Southern Breeze 2007 Summer Issue - (Page 20) travel ART OF LIVING Stranger than Fiction Ravi Howard dramatizes a traumatic event in Mobile’s history in his lauded debut novel. story by MARK A. NEWMAN photography by C. ROSS M Ravi Howard (right and below) takes the leap from television producer to penning novels. He and his wife now call Mobile their home (opposite). RAVI HOWARD Like Trees, Walking Amistad Press www.ravihoward.com obile resident and first-time novelist, Ravi Howard has gone from temp work to an editorial assistant at a travel magazine to an Emmy Award-winning producer for HBO’s Inside the NFL. And now, he’s a novelist. His first book, Like Trees, Walking, takes a cold, hard look at Mobile in 1981 in the aftermath of the lynching of Michael Donald, an African-American teenager. The ensuing trial split the community down racial lines and even bankrupted the Ku Klux Klan, who perpetrated the heinous crime. Although he lived in Jackson, Mississippi when the crime occurred, Ravi was drawn to the story since he had family in Mobile and Baldwin counties. “Writers always go back to those stories from their childhoods or from their past and it was very much a part of the history of Mobile,” he explains. “Once I became a writer I was drawn to stories with a historical basis.” Ravi is taking a well traveled literary road traversed by the likes of Ann Rule, Joe McGinnis, and the trail blazer for the genre, Truman Capote, who’s novel In Cold Blood revolutionized how true crime was covered in novels. But for Ravi the biggest challenge was writing for so many audiences—those people from Mobile who remember the crime vividly, as well as the audience at large. “For me the challenge is to make sure any reader coming to the story, no matter what kind of personal history they have with this case, will be able to get something out of it,” he says. “I had to diffuse that with a sense of storytelling that would also be compelling. I want the reader to still get something from the story in addition to the way it is told.” Growing up in Jackson, Mississippi and Montgomery, Ravi got his first taste of fiction writing in high school when he entered a short story writing contest sponsored by the F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald Museum in Montgomery. That endeavor earned the young author $15, his picture in the paper, and his first taste of “fame and fortune.” He continued writing for literary magazines in high school and campus publications at Howard University in Washington D.C. and the University of Virginia’s MFA program. A short story version of Like Trees, Walking earned Ravi a Wright/Hurston Award for College Writers in 2001. 20 s o u t h e r n b re e z e . c o m http://www.ravihoward.com http://southernbreeze.com
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