We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Eugene Ward. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Eugene below.
Alright, Eugene thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.
If I’m doing my job right as an artist, I haven’t written it yet. Every narrative is an opportunity to shift, change and grow in the realm of my craft, and I hope to outdo myself each time. That said, there are two that come to mind for two different reasons.
Growing up, I never had the opportunity to see heroes who looked like me. In all the comics, TV shows, video games and movies, the Black male was always the comic relief, the clown, the heavy, or the mystical Brown person there to teach the Caucasian lead a spiritual lesson or impart a cryptic message before getting shuffled off the stage back to obscurity. The Black female was always over the top, a cartoonish degree of sassy, or an object of lust and salaciousness.
I swore to write narratives that would elevate minority leads. I had to create the heroes I wanted to see, the men and women I wanted young Blacks to be able to look up to and want to be like.
In 2022 the arena has changed by degrees, but it’s still centimeters rather than kilometers, and barely even that. For example, Disney gave us a Black “princess” in 2009, but she was one whose greatest ambition was to own a big restaurant whose narrative ended with her marrying a shiftless layabout stripped of his royal ranking whose greatest claim to fame was learning how to mince vegetables by the time the credits rolled.
When I set out to create the series Nora and the Eternal Waterwheel, Nora was the culmination of several other Black warrior princess narratives I had written, a series seeking to combine the thrill, excitement and flair for the dramatic romantic found in the high fantasy genre while showing people everywhere a strong, intelligent and relatable young Black female lead. I’m so very proud of the love readers have given Nora and her friends and family, as well as the responses I’ve received of how refreshing and empowering it is to see a novel starring a diverse range of ethnicities experiencing a broad spectrum of challenges, and one that affirms and empowers the strength of female friendships while also still being accessible to male readers.
And, though it is one of my less well known stories, the three part narrative Tribus Dulce is close to my heart, in particular the struggles of deuteragonist Darrian Travis. In this story I was able to draw from my own experiences and show a young Black male lead struggling with everything from depression, anxiety and toxic masculinity pressures to traversing being a survivor of sexual abuse as well as trying to navigate his faith in a world that at every turn shows no use for it. That all of this is wrapped up in a high octane urban fantasy super hero drama adds all the more excitement and opportunity to the tale.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
My name is Eugene Ward, though I most commonly go by the monickers Eugene The Author or Xeawn Cross depending on the project. As the name implies, I’m an independent author writing across all genres but specializing in speculative fiction, dark/high/urban fantasy, horror and romance. I also compose music across an amalgam of genres referred to as a whole as “binary music” and design indie video games.
I suppose you could say I got into what I do in order to create the narratives I wished to see. As a Black artist I grew up never seeing heroes that looked like me and still the landscape isn’t great, and as a Christian artist, especially one on the fringe, I’m not really anyone’s target audience!
When you think Christian media, typically things like movies about fundraisers, “I left the church and now I want to come back again”, and debating God’s existence come to mind. If you look at what faith based fiction can really be, however, you’ll see stories in the Bible with everything from shape shifters to masters of the elements to warriors felling whole armies on their own, and I always wanted to show that faith driven literature can be so much more than the landscape we see.
To that end, I saw the huge dearth in the medium and decided to create the kinds of stories I wanted to see and felt countless others would enjoy also. Growing up with a love of high fantasy, noir, horror and mystery, I knew I could craft narratives that married those concepts with faith in a unique and interesting way. In stories like Nora and the Eternal Waterwheel I was able to bring together the concepts of a dimension hopping warrior princess with struggles of faith, family and belonging. In narratives like K.A.C.: In the Village of the Devil’s Daughters I enjoyed weaving together a dark fantasy sword epic mystery that also addressed topics like overcoming abuse and standing firm in your belief when the world revels in telling you to discard it and fall in with the waves of entropy around you.
In everything I write, I work to follow the mantra “In all things, do no harm, and at all times, heal.” I find meaning in my craft by working as hard to entertain as I do to provide the opportunity to grow, to shift paradigms, and to comfort and help change. Books are far more than words on pages; they are love, life, companionship, understanding, and a means to provide a gateway to whole new worlds.
My stories are not just for Christians, and in fact they’re not really my target audience (and my demographic numbers reflect that). No, my audience is people, regardless of gender, faith background, ethnicity, identity, I desire to bring about a literary universe that connects us all with one another, entertains us, and challenges our experiences and realities along the way.
If in some small way I have offered salve through my literature, I believe that is the truly the most meaningful art I can create.
Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?
I mean, really I think my whole path up to this point is a testament to that! It’s not easy being indie, and being a fringe Christian artist means I get the mountains of rejection letters from both sides.
Many Christian publishers, agents, media groups have always recoiled and said, “Your writing is strong, but your content is problematic. Why do you have to talk about the issues the church has? Why do you have to have all this supernatural stuff, like werewolves and magic and all that? And the LGBT characters and how the Christian characters interact with them is problematic, do you have to have them in there?”
On the flip side, many secular publishers, agents, media groups have said, “Love the action, the drama, the magic and all, but do you have to talk about God so much? Do the heroes *have* to be Christians? Can you just cut out all that religious stuff?”
I started this journey as a teenager though I’ve been writing all my life, and being transparent every day is a battle to keep putting figurative pen to page. The road is winding and entropic and it’s difficult to stand out in the rain and look through the window and say, “When is it gonna be my shot?”
But you can’t give up.
One of my favorite personal stories is how a book I submitted to a particular panel that was deciding on artists they were going to give grants and resources to was rejected with a letter stating it was, quote, “Boring, uninteresting, without merit, pathetic,” and on and on.
That same book has become my most successful seller, and one that readers continue to share their joy in reading. It took some eight years after that rejection letter to find my audience, but fans of the novel have gone on to say how empowering it is to read a protagonist they identify with, a young Black female lead in a high fantasy story that weaves strongly the bonds of friendship, sisterhood, leadership and more.
If I’ve learned nothing else on this long, long road, it’s that you’re going to hear “no” far more than “yes”, but the only time your dream truly ends is when you choose to listen to the naysayers and stop fighting. More than anything, endeavor to always stay hungry, and to keep fighting for your opportunity to soar.
For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?
I think what I find most rewarding about being an artist and creator of content is the human connection that comes with it. I love writing and crafting worlds, to the point that there’s literally never a time that it’s not on my mind. I’m forever dreaming up new stories, forever thinking about what my characters are up to, it’s really and truly how I see the world and stay sane in it.
The best part for me though is talking to someone who has read one of my books or played one of my games. Seeing their eyes light up, hearing the excitement in their voices, listening to their thoughts, feedback, theories and reactions energizes and invigorates me. One of my favorite interactions was having a reader come up to me at an event and open the conversation with a stern, glossy gaze and say,
“I hate you.”
To which I said, “I’m…sorry?”
To which she said with a laugh,
“You should be! You’ve killed her and I’ll never forgive you! She was my favorite character in the series!”
To which I said with a smile, “Ah, then I’ve done my job.”
Having readers who struggle with questions of faith tell me my novels have given them solace and guidance, having individuals across the LGBTQI+ community say they’ve not ever seen faith based media make them feel so human, respected, seen. To know that my stories have the capacity to bridge the gap between people and reinforce that we don’t all have to agree to treat one another with decency and humanity is my greatest joy as an artist. And, if I’ve entertained and captivated along the way, I consider my literary mission complete!
Contact Info:
- Website: www.eugenetheauthor.com
- Instagram: @eugenetheauthor
- Twitter: @eugenetheauthor