Roger Mourad Jr. is a retired lawyer who spent much of his career as director of institutional research at Washtenaw Community College. He’s done a lot of professional writing over the years. Now, at the age of 66, he’s published his first novel.
Much of the book is set in Michigan.
WKAR’s Scott Pohl talks with Mourad about his fiction debut, Road Trip to the Future.
Interview Transcript
Scott Pohl: Roger Mourad, welcome.
Roger Mourad Jr.: Thank you.
Pohl: Your new novel, Road Trip to the Future, you've described it as having a focus on the historical racial divide between Detroit and Grosse Pointe. Tell me why you wanted to do that in this novel.
Mourad: I think it's something that I've always carried with me and bringing it to consciousness and putting it on paper was a way for me to kind of deal with it.
Pohl: As I read your book, Roger, I thought of it as being largely a road trip story where things go horribly wrong. There are comedic elements within that, but these two guys looking to go to Chicago and find a friend who's missing, and they have, safe to say, mishaps along the way.
Mourad: Yes. That's true.
Pohl: And a lot of this is in southern Michigan along the I-94 corridor. Is that a drive you've made yourself over the years?
Mourad: Oh yes, oh yes. When I was young, in college, I think was the first time, and I've even done it recently because one of my adult sons lives there, and the other one used to live there, so I've made that trip many times.
Pohl: Well, these two men haven't seen each other in a very long time and the missing friend in Chicago has also been out of their sphere for some length of time. I almost thought of this as having a little bit of a connection to something like Waiting for Godot, where as you're reading the story, you're wondering if this third character is ever going to appear.
Mourad: Well, that was something I wrestled with, actually. The way it comes out, which I won't reveal, was part of the process of writing. It wasn't foretold in my mind at all.
Pohl: And yet, as I was reading the book, I found myself drawn in by these two characters — the arguments that they have, the mishaps that they have, and what we slowly learn about the third character, whether or not we ever do encounter him in the story. That was how I found myself drawn into this book.
Mourad: Well, I'm glad of that because that was what I was trying to do. There's humor throughout the story, and I hope people pick up on that humor because that was part of the way I wanted to draw the readers in.
I didn't want it to just be an intellectual exercise, and I didn't want it to just be a dialogue that didn't have any other slant to it. I wanted there to be a lot of humor and I wanted people to see the humor in these guys fumbling along at an older age as they try to make sense of their lives along the road.
Pohl: You know, guy humor is maybe one way I might describe it, that the way guys insult each other and find humor in that. That's part of what's happening here, too.
Mourad: Yes, absolutely. It is a guy, in a way, a guy story, although most readers I have been told are women, and I hope they connect with that as well.
Pohl: You used the word dialogue earlier and I wanted to bring that up too, that what lots of writers say about writing fiction, that they find to be troublesome or difficult, is writing good dialogue. And you have very long stretches of dialogue here that flows. You always know who's saying what. It sounds like a real conversation. For someone who's never written a novel, I think the way you wrote dialogue is pretty compelling. Very well done.
Mourad: Well, thank you. I appreciate that. I worked very hard on that because I wanted it to be readable. I didn't want it to be too talky. I do have some experience, amateur experience, I should say, writing screenplay format. So, I feel that dialogue is something I'm comfortable with.
Pohl: What would you say you would like a reader to think when they turn the last page of Road Trip to the Future?
Mourad: I want them to think about their place in the world and how that is connected to the future, and what it means to live in a just society, as a question.
Pohl: And hopefully, they've had some fun along the way. Roger Mourad is the first time novelist of Road Trip to the Future. We've been talking with him from his home in Ann Arbor. Roger, thank you, and good luck with the book.
Mourad: Thank you, Scott.
Pohl: For WKAR news, I'm Scott Pohl.
This interview has been edited for clarity and conciseness.
