Ila Proud Team Justice Member asked Alan Drew:

Who do you credit for influencing your writing and what made you want to become a writer? Was a story, book, or individual in your life responsible for your love of words and putting them together to tell a story to share with the world? Thank You for your time and I'm looking forward to reading your books. I discovered you here. I love finding new authors to expand my reading experience. Ila

Alan Drew I'm sorry it took so long for me to answer this question. When I was in high school I was an oil painter, of landscapes mostly, and I was involved in musical theater. I went to college as an art major, but quickly realized that I was way out of my league with the other artists who were doing wild conceptual stuff. I then became a vocal performance major, but quickly realized that I was terrified to sing in front of people. This set off a bit of a crisis and I basically majored in beer drinking and nearly dropped out of college, but a friend of mine and I took a summer trip driving around the country. I started keeping a journal, something I'd never done in my life. I quickly grew bored of daily accounts of our activities and started writing poetry--mostly terrible stuff about a young woman I was in love with and who had recently broken up with me!--and that grew into short stories, which I found I loved writing. I'd always been a fairly good writer, so when I came back to college I changed my major to English with a concentration creative writing. Suddenly I was reading voraciously and writing constantly. Still, it wasn't for another two-decades nearly--after I became a high school teacher, after living in Turkey, after I met a friend who was writing a novel and encouraged me to do so myself--that I published my first novel, Gardens of Water.

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