What is your favorite color?
Red. Always has been. At a very young age, I convinced my mother to put red everything in my bedroom – carpet, bedcover, you name it. I don’t know why I was drawn to that color, but it has been a constant my whole life and has never wavered.
What social issues interest you the most?
The incarceration and adultification of kids. No surprise there since that’s a large part of my life’s work and my writing. A country that teaches its children to be violent and anti-social, that gets them drug addicted, that forces them to grow up in dangerous, poverty-stricken neighborhoods, that actually makes them mentally ill by all of the above and then wants to pretend they’re adults when they commit crimes so it can throw them into prison for life is a disgraceful country!
And we are a disgrace. We incarcerate more kids than any country in the world. We say they should be treated as adults when they do something wrong but not when they do something right. This is egregiously hypocritical since it’s our adult-created society that taught them the criminal behaviors in the first place. Shameful!
What is your favorite quote, by whom, and why?
“There are two races of men in this world, but only these two—the “race” of the decent man and the “race” of the indecent man.” – Viktor Frankl
I love this quote because it’s exactly how I think. Being decent or indecent to each other is a choice we make. Virtually everything else is a function of how we’re born – race, gender, sexual orientation, eye color, hair color, height, etc. But how we treat others is always a choice. Even if we’ve been taught the wrong behaviors as children, we can unlearn those behaviors and become decent human beings. What the kids call “haters” are indecent people who choose to be that way, and I choose to be the opposite.
What are you most proud of accomplishing so far in your life?
I’d say I’m most proud of being someone of honor and integrity and have modeled these qualities in my teaching, volunteer work, and in my personal life. People know they can count on me if the need arises. Kids know they can talk with me about anything and I won’t denigrate or judge them. I don’t even know any more how many young people have told me that I’m an unusual person, that they never met somebody like me. That’s sad that they’ve never known someone with what I would consider easy to adopt and essential qualities, but I’m proud they see me as someone they can trust and count on.
What do you hope people will take away from your writing? How will your words make them feel?
As a child growing up I was hearing impaired which contributed to my being shy and introverted, and I didn’t have a huge number of friends. Books gave me somewhere to go, places I knew I’d never be able to go in real life, and they sparked my bountiful imagination. Sometimes they made me laugh and sometimes cry, but well-written books always got me caught up with the characters and situations. I love the idea of touching someone else’s heart and mind through my writing the same way my heart and mind were so often touched, and even influenced or inspired, as a kid growing up.
I like to celebrate the better qualities in human beings, rather than the lowest ignoble instincts that seem to be the staple of so much of our “entertainment” today. I’d like readers to feel good about themselves as human beings by experiencing in my stories the greatness we humans can aspire to, rather than the baseness we so often bow down to. I hope I’ve achieved that goal with Children of the Knight and will continue to achieve it with the two sequels and in my future work.
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Genre – Edgy Young Adult
Rating – PG13
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Website http://michaeljbowler.com/
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