Hugh Aaron, a native of Worcester, Massachusetts, received a Liberal Arts degree in the Humanities at The University of Chicago. For three years as a Seabee he served in the South Pacific during WWII. He was CEO of his own plastics manufacturing business for 20 years before selling it to write full time. Several of his short stories have been published in national magazines and 18 of his essays on business management have appeared in The Wall Street Journal. He is the author of Business Not as Usual: How to Win Managing a Company through Hard and Easy Times. Currently he’s writing and producing plays.
His latest book is a short story collection, Stories From a Lifetime.
You can visit his website at www.stonespointbooks.com or his blog at www.businesswisdom.blogspot.com.
Q: Thank you for this interview, Hugh. Can you tell us what your latest book, Stories From a Lifetime, is all about?
Stories from a Lifetime carries readers through a widely diverse series of life’s peaks and valleys with poignant, clear-eyed vision and understanding that is only gradually gained across the course of a lifetime through endurance and honest appraisal of the emotional rollercoaster that we all ride.
These stories form a welcome, and increasingly rare, honest, grounded, and beautifully written collection that will touch nerves while sympathizing with what it means to be human
Q: Can you tell us a little about your main and supporting characters?
Each of the 36 stories has different characters from a soldier at war to a mature couple in love.
Q: Do you tend to base your characters on real people or are they totally from your imagination?
Some characters are modeled after people I knew, some entirely fictional.
Q: Are you consciously aware of the plot before you begin a novel, or do you discover it as you write?
I rarely know how a story will end, but I know how my characters behave.
Q: Does the setting play a major part in the development of your story?
In some stories the setting is crucial as in The Vow, in others as in The 37th Year less important.
Q: Open the book to page 69. What is happening?
A young man has just concluded a meeting with his former boss who is trying to rehire him. The young man is reluctant because he felt he was unjustly fired, but he gives in, although he has self-doubts.
Q: Can you give us one of your best excerpts?
His job wasn’t the worst job. His boss wasn’t the worst boss. There’s the house with the mortgage, the new car with its payments, the wife and children he loves. Yes, tomorrow at 8:26 a.m. George Amen will enter the driveway to the factory parking lot and park his car in its usual spot, and at 8:30 a.m. he will sit down at his desk and start doing what someone else wants him to do. But at least for that one day, yesterday, he knew what it felt like to call the shots.
Q: Thank you so much for this interview, Hugh. We wish you much success!
As The Pages Turn 