Michael Cogdill Unveils Novel This Weekend
Michael Cogdill
Michael Cogdill is a familiar face in the Upstate of South Carolina. The Asheville-native turned news anchor, journalist, film producer, screenwriter—who’s appeared on appeared on NBC’s Today Show, CNBC, MSNBC, and CNN—can now add novelist to his impressive repertoire. The digital release of his new novel She Rain is this weekend—and he’ll be at The Spinning Jenny Friday night (June 10th) for a meet and greet.
We spoke with Michael Cogdill, the 30 Emmy Award-winning media figure about his book and what readers can excitedly expect upon release.
Q: Tell us about She Rain, from the author’s perspective. What is the book about and what do you want the audience to draw from it?
Cogdill: She Rain grew out of a despair I never knew, and into a romance I never saw coming. My grandfather, Earnest Keyes, was an opium addict, hopelessly lost in paragoric. Morphine was everywhere back then, just in different forms. He died long before I was born, but I'd heard stories -- the beauty of the man apart from the demon on drugs. I began writing a story that tried to dig him from his early grave. Other kids had grandfathers. I grew up without one. I wrote first as a grown man in pursuit of him. Then along came a true story from my mother. Miss Polly, as everyone knew her late in life, told of a largely secreted act of kindness. As a child, she'd given some food to a desperately poor child going hungry and terribly hazed in school. Bang. That gave me the girl. You have no novel without the girl. That energy between the sexes is timeless, a force of nature and the pursuit of art. I want the audience entertained by that primal energy, the forces that pull a backwater boy up into a man no one saw coming. There's a magnetism to rags to riches. A far greater one in despair turned dream come true. The boy in She Rain could never imagine how good his life could be in the hands of TWO exceptional women. One of those women is still a mystery to me. My Sophia stepped from the wilderness of my imagination -- an African American hero so far ahead of her time. Heat rises. She Rain is all about that. The heat of despair, the young in unstoppable lust and love, the warming lift of fidelity in marriage and in friendship, and the universal appetite for being fully alive. I wrote it to be a good entertaining tale that lingers in the heart and mind way after -- THE END. To carry readers away, make them feel something, give some breathless fun and the wildly unexpected -- these are what I wanted. She Rain did all this for me as the writer. All unexpected. That's part of the mystery of a book.
Q: You’ve led an accomplished career both in front of and behind the camera. At what point did you find yourself gravitating towards writing and the idea of authoring these types of novels?
Cogdill: I've loved writing as long as I remember breathing. The thirst for language and what it can do still makes me feel like just a dreaming boy. In my career, I told the news of the day -- human tragedy and human exceptionalism. It's not a great distance from that reality to writing from the imagination. Writing She Rain became my escape. My 4:30 AM escape too often. Anchoring the news and being a long-form reporter was a dream from the time I was in grammar school. The novel hatched from that dream. All effective anchors are writers. I just kept going after the lights dimmed each night.
Michael Cogdill on air during his time at WYFF in Greenville.
