Valerie - Welcome to Bookworthy. Today we're talking with Mark L. Redmond about his middle-grade book, The Adventures of the Box M Gang. Mark taught high school English for 28 years and has published a whole host of books and short stories, many with a good bit of Western flair. Welcome to Bookworthy Mark.
Mark -Thank you, I'm happy to be here.
Valerie - It is a pleasure. Now as a former high school teacher, I have a soft spot in my heart for English teachers because I had an amazing one when I was in high school. So I have to ask, what is your favorite required reading book that you have to teach to your students?
Mark -I would think probably senior English Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe was one of the favorites. I took 12 senior classes through that book.
Valerie -That's a big book to go through and a lot to go through.
Mark -Well, I found an abridged version that was very, very well done because I read the unabridged version and there was no way I would subject an English class to that. But somebody had gone through and abridged it to about maybe a third of its original length and just did a superb job. So we used that.
Valerie - I remember there were definitely some hit and misses with some of those books that were abridged and unabridged. I'm sure those 12th graders definitely appreciated that version that you found for sure.
Mark -That may be the only abridged version of anything I ever used. I don't like abridgments, but that was a that was a necessary one.
Valerie -Well, Mark, tell us a little bit about your book, The Adventures of the Box M Gang.
Mark -Well, I've written the first two and I'm when I well I'll tell you about the other one later. It's in the Arizona territory and my wife and I live in Arizona so there's so much history surrounding us it's easy to gather it and these five siblings the oldest one is Ruth who's 15 and the youngest is Billy who's eight and there are five of them and they've their mother passed away years before the book started but they lose their father early in the in fact in the first chapter of the Box gang and if anybody finds out that they're on their ranch the Box without an adult they'll wind up They're in a little town, little close to a little town called Green Valley and the closest big town is Tucson. And if anybody finds out they're there on their own, they'll wind up in the orphanage in Tucson. So, the whole goal of these five kids is to keep anybody
from finding out that they're there by themselves so they can stay on the ranch that they love and live there. But they have to run it and make it work just as if their father was still there with them. And that turns out to be easier than it would have in some circumstances because after they lost their mom, their father was kind of a broken man and really didn't do a whole lot of the work around there. The kids were covering most of it. And the book is told, the narrator of the book is 15-year-old Ruth.
Valerie -It's a very interesting kind of cast of characters. It's neat to watch how each of the siblings handles the death of their father, as well as handles, you know, dealing with the news that, no, they could go to an orphanage. You know, like the resolve that they step into to say, no, we're going to run this like we normally have done and, we're going to stay together as a family, which is kind of their whole goal is just to stay together. And I love those relationships as a mom of three boys, I really want them to have that kind of relationship where we have good days and bad days, right? Now, you said you do live in the Arizona territories. What inspires you the most about kind of the period that the Box M Gang is set in?
Mark -Well, I'll try to condense this. When I was in elementary, even before I started school, kindergarten, at that age, all television was black and white. Saturday mornings were Westerns. I mean, that's pretty much most of what was on Saturday mornings. So, I began
watching those. Didn't watch a lot of television, but on Saturday mornings I would get to watch three or four of those half-hour episodes. And they were people like Roy Rogers and Gene Autry and Hop Along Cassidy and those characters. And I just fell in love with like so many thousands, probably millions of other young boys. I wanted to be a cowboy. And so I got really excited about that. And then As I got older, I began to read some fiction books, Jane Grey, eventually Louis Lamour, Max Brand, and some of the top Western authors. And I noticed a difference between what those authors were telling me and what those programs, those half-hour programs had told me. So when I got
even older, I started reading American history. And I thought it was like finding out that there was no Santa Claus. I mean, those those as much fun as they were and still are those Saturday morning programs. Whoever put them together had never read anything about history. I mean, they'd start with even like Wyatt Earp. They start with a real character, but from there on, that's that's all that they used to do. Nothing else was real. So I wanted I felt betrayed. So I wanted kids to know what the old West was really like. And that was what started me way back when I wrote the first book I wrote, Artie Goes West, in the Artie Anderson series. I wanted to let kids know what the old West was really like. So even though they're fictional, all of my work is fictional, it's historically accurate.
Valerie - I love that and it was really neat to kind of walk through the first of this series and to kind of get a sense of where those kids were located and what was going on, not just with bandits and sheriffs and how that all worked as well as a little bit of just the difference of cultures. Because you have one of the characters that, one of the adults that steps in and it kind of helps them a little bit, is an African American man. Is it just a difference, he's a bounty hunter, I believe. And it's just those different responses that happened historically and just the neat ways that kids just easily embrace that character as one of their own family. It's really neat.
Mark - Hollywood kind of ignored the fact that there were all kinds of different cultures, and they stereotyped the few that they did put in there, know, like Tonto with the Lone Ranger and things like that. But they kind of ignored African American people and there were hundreds, if not thousands of Black American cowboys that were some of the best cowboys and most reliable workers out there.
Valerie -It is kind of a hidden part of history that we just don't always get the full picture in the school textbooks, do we?
Mark - Well, and that is another reason, another motivation for writing about this period. I went to elementary school and high school and took college prep classes. And then I graduated from high school and went to Tennessee Temple College in Chattanooga, Tennessee. And not once in all those years of education. Did I hear any American history teacher mention the words Old West? It just never, it's like it never existed. The best history teacher I ever had was at Temple and he was magnificent going through the Civil War period, but he ran out of time and that was all we covered. Mean, he covered pre-Civil War, and then he hit the Civil War and spent the rest of the semester discussing that and then we were out of time. So nobody in formal education for me, and I know it's the same for pretty much everybody else too, nobody even talked about the old West.
Valerie -It is a kind of, what is it, just like you've seen a lot of more World War II stories coming out as people are communicating and families are finding these stories from their relatives that have passed. It's a lot similar to that in the Old West. There are so many stories and so many amazing people who went out West and did so many amazing things. I have family that was moved from Indiana to Texas And kind of their old West stories are in the Dust Bowl and all those kinds of stuff. It's really sweet, amazing stories of how they, I don't know, just really had to survive and rely on each other. And I think there's.
Mark -Exactly. It's not all cowboys and Indians shooting at each other. There's so much more there.
Valerie - Yeah, no, it's not. Yeah. Yeah, it's one of those, think in our very city-oriented, busy hustle-bustle life, we kind of forget about that need of community, need of each other. And I think that you know, kind of the old West, there was a need, you would need to survive based on who was nearby. If you didn't have it at your ranch, you had to hope that the one of, you know, a few hundred miles the other way did. And so it's just a neat idea of how community affects families and children and just the lives that people lived out West. It's neat Now Mark, did you always want to be an author?
Mark -Well, from the time I was in probably seventh grade, I had a seventh-grade English teacher who was very, very good and she had us write journals. We could write anything we wanted, poetry and I love it, I wrote a lot of poetry. It was goofy poetry when I was in elementary and junior high school, but I wrote a lot of Poetry and then eventually got into writing some short stories. You know, you mentioned that you had an English teacher who really influenced you in my sophomore and senior year I Had the same English teacher in high school and he's the one that cemented in my mind that I wanted to be an English teacher. He was phenomenal just an excellent teacher.
Valerie- Teachers do have a magical power to help direct us, don't they? That is true. They do hold a very high power in children's minds, no matter if they're six or 18. Well, Mark, what is kind of your goal for communicating? What do you want to communicate the most with this Box gang series?
Mark -Well, I think there are two things. One is what I mentioned earlier. I want kids to know what the Old West was really like. They get a good glimpse of everyday life on a ranch, how much work it was, there were setbacks, and things like that. But as a Christian, my main goal is to show young people and a lot of adults who don't even have kids read these books too. But I want to show especially young people that God worked back then in people's lives just as he
does now. When I first wrote Artie Goes West, I was a very young teacher. I was in my 20s. One of my fellow teachers had graduated from another Christian college and she said they have their printing press. They have a publishing company. You need to send this to them. So, yeah, I mean, I was a young author. I thought I had finished the book. I thought I would send it out and I'd get a letter back saying, wow, this is so good. We're going to publish it. Thank you for letting us have it. But what I got back from that Christian college press was a very haughty-sounding rejection. And one of the comments that the editor made was, there are too many Christian cowboys in this book. There weren't that many Christian cowboys. And I remember reading that and thinking, well, you don't know anything about history because there were, I mean, there were a lot of Christians back then, just as there are now, a lot of believers. So I mean, that one, that was just a closed door. But I kept going and 11 years later, I got somebody who published the book. That's how long it took with that first one.
Valerie - Sometimes it takes a long time for everything is for a story to hit the right space, right?
Mark -Well, when people ask me, young people ask, what do I need to know if I want to be a writer? And I tell them two things. You have to be persistent and you have to have thick skin. Because during those 11 years that I was trying to get that book published, I got a lot of rejections. But I just kept sending it out again, changing something. If I saw something show up in two or three comments and while I was doing that, I took a couple of writing courses. And one of the courses said if you're trying to get a book published while you're doing that, publish short stories. So that's when I started writing short stories and a couple of articles. And I got those published and it made my portfolio look better and eventually got the attention of the people who published that six-book series I started with.
Valerie- Yep. It's one of those things I remember reading. I think Stephen King's book on writing that he had like a clipboard where all his rejections and just to be like, if you're getting a rejection, then that means you are doing something towards your goal. And you know, if you're not getting the rejections, then are you really trying to get your book out there? So it's, it definitely, yeah.
Mark -And everybody gets them. One of my favorite mystery authors is P .D. James. I saw an interview with her years ago and somebody said, what do do with rejections? And she smiled and she said, my study is papered with them. And so she said, that's how many I got. All my walls are covered. So it happens with everybody. You just have to keep going.
Valerie -Yeah. What is it? Dr. Seuss was rejected over 27 times and I think, you know, I'm blanking on Harry Potter's author, JK Rowling. She got rejected many times and you know, they're probably very upset at themselves for rejecting Harry Potter. Well, Mark, what's one of your favorite books?
Mark -Well, it's funny, my kids, my students used to ask me that once in a while. And they, because they knew how much I like Westerns. If I were picking Westerns, I'd start with one of the early ones I read by Zane Gray, Riders of the Purple Sage, which most people say is the
best book he ever wrote. And that was a very good one. If I were just looking if genre didn't matter, and this used to startle my students, I got hooked, when I was probably in eighth or ninth grade maybe, I read my first Tarzan book by Edgar Rice Burroughs and I wound up reading the entire 20, I think it's 24 book series and I eventually had them all in my study just because Edgar Rice Burroughs was such a superb writer. If you look at classics, then my students want to know what my favorite classic was, I would probably say The Count of Monte Cristo. Just because it's a masterpiece. Such incredible writing.
Valerie -It is. Yeah, that's one of my favorite classics too. It's right up there, actually. It is. Long book. I've read the abridged and the unabridged version because it is an amazing book. It's neat to see how something as simple as, know, not as simple, but the Tarzan books from, you know, when you were young influenced the type of writing that you were doing for kids too, just that sense of adventure and that sense of family and, you know, all those kinds of elements of those Tarzan books, you kind of can see in your own stories as well.
Mark -Well Edgar Rice Burroughs was a master. Would, if you read one of his books, you read chapter one and he takes you right to a cliffhanger at the end of the chapter and stops and you think, I have to read chapter two. But when you do, it's a completely different story starting somewhere else. And then the third chapter, he does the same thing. And then he just weaves those three chapters together into a story. I've never seen anybody do that better than he does.
Valerie - Definitely want to read for sure. He took you on a ride and you didn't know where you were going next. Very cool. Well, what can we expect next from you, Mark?
Mark -Well, I'm working on I have I have three series right now. The first series I did was the Artie Goes West series which was published by Sword of the Lord Publishers in Murfreesboro,
Tennessee. And they're gradually as they sell out of those books, they're turning the rights back over to me. So I've already published self-published one of mine, the second one in the series, and I'll do the other ones as they come out. Then I have a second series I started when I was teaching I was writing the Artie Anderson books and I would do book signings at some of the school events and I had a bunch of parents come up to my table one night and they said look our kids really love the Artie books and I said well thank you and they said but enough of the kids books write something for us and I thought I never had even that had never occurred to me. So I started and I started it set it aside And then came back to it years later I started the Nate Landry series bounty hunter Nate Landry and there are three of them I'm almost done with the fourth one. I'll be working on it later today I hope to finish it this week and have it published in September because I'm self-published now. I had several other books that were traditionally published, but 2020 knocked the
publisher out of business. So he said, don't let these books sit. Need you to, he said, self-publish or give them to somebody else to publish. So I thought, how hard can self-publishing be? And six months later, after I finally figured it out, I republished those books. But I'm working on that. I'm at the stage now where I'm almost done with that Bounty Hunter Nate Landry book and I have people who've read the first two Box Am Gang books saying, come on, when's the next one coming out? So as soon as I get done, I'll probably take a couple of days' break and then start. I mean, I've been retired for quite a while, but my wife is still working, she's the office manager at the resort where we live. So, five days a week, we're up at five o 'o'clock in the morning. And she goes to work a little before seven and I start working on writing. And I work till three or between three and four when she comes home and I quit. So, I'm trying, I wanna get that next Box Gang book out before Christmas. So, we'll see how that works out.
Valerie -That sounds exciting. Know it's definitely a fun cast of characters put into fun situations that kids can both relate to and learn from as well as gain a greater sense of that old, old West lifestyle too. Well, Mark, where can people find out more about you and your books?
Mark - Well, my favorite place and, Susie, my wife always tells me, to tell them about your website first. So www.markelredman.com is a wonderful website. My web designer did such a great job on it and she makes updates whenever I need them. But my books are available pretty much. Mean, you can find them on amazon.com, which is my least favorite place to look for them, because they've scrambled some things and I can't get them to unscramble them. They're available on BarnesandNoble.com and Walmart.com and Kobo.com, everywhere like that. Anywhere you can find books, they're usually there. Also, I have a YouTube page that's Mark Redmond at Cowboy. I think it's a writer. Yeah, markredmond at cowboywriter. I'm on Facebook. My Facebook page is marklredmond. If you go to my website, I have a weekly email that comes out every Friday that keeps you up with where I am in my writing, where Susie and I are going to be at a book table, and all kinds of information like that. And then occasionally you get little bonuses ahead of everybody else. But those are some of the, I'm starting, I tell you, my grandkids are laughing at me because I'm trying to learn TikTok. And I have a class that I'm gonna be taking in the next couple of weeks after I get done with this book that will train me to be more efficient with that. And then also I'm on Instagram, but not nearly as often as Facebook. Facebook is my usual go-to place.
Valerie - We'll make sure to have those links in the descriptions for everyone to be able to click and find you easily for sure. Well, thank you, Mark, for joining me today.
Mark - Thank you. It's been a pleasure.
Valerie -And thank you for joining Mark and me on this episode of the Bookworthy Podcast. Check the show notes for any books or links that we discussed and let us know in the comments what your favorite required reading book in high school was. Be sure to like and subscribe so we can discover more great books together.
Happy reading!
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