Interview with Author Rajam Roose

 

What is your current book and tell us a little about it?

Travels With A Road Dog: Hitchhiking Along the Roads of the Americas. A memoir about the personal growth and adventures of a young woman who gives away her belongings to travels five countries with a blanket, cooking pot, tarp, matches and a dog.

How did you come up with the title?

The title actually has two meanings. The term “road dog” is used for someone who is always on the road, but it can also mean a traveling companion. I thought this fitting since I spent almost five years living on the road and most of that time had a dog as a companion.

Is there a message in your novel that you want readers to grasp?

The main message is that people in the world are generally helpful and we have much more in common with each other than not.

Are the experiences based on someone you know, or events in your own life?

These experiences are based on my life. I’ve interwoven personal details about my upbringing to explain the way that I grow and change in my travels from a naive young girl into a woman.

What was the hardest part of writing your book?

Editing! I was so fortunate to have the help of a professional editor who had read some of my stories I posted about ten years ago on a hitchhiking website. He contacted me to generously offer his support and help simply because he enjoyed helping writers. Later, I paid for a professional edit to fine tune any grammatical errors that may have been in the book.

When you look at the same stories over and over, it’s really easy to get tired of them. We went through each chapter and sent it back and forth, making changes. That was a lot of hard work, especially since I also am running a small business.

Do you recall how your interest in writing originated?

I don’t remember not knowing how to read and when I was a child, I used to write little mini-books. Not sure if you recall those little scholastic book catalogs they gave out in middle school, but I once created one with book titles and gave it to my younger sister for her to try and sell to her classmates at her elementary school. My plan was to write the book when it was ordered. No one placed an order!

Who is your favorite author and what is it that really strikes you about their work?

There are many favorite authors, but I’ll just choose one. I really enjoy reading anything by Wade Davis. He has such a great worldview and when he writes about other cultures, he does it in a really non-biased way. That’s really rare for a writer to be able to live with other peoples outside their comfort zone and not have judgement.

What inspired you to write your first book?

This is my first published book. When I finished traveling and was attending school to learn massage therapy, I had a really difficult time living in the present. All I could think about were my travels and how much they changed my life. One day I sat down and wrote the entire thing out and that really helped me be able to put it behind me and move on.

Later, I realized that there weren’t any stories like this really out there and I wanted to share what these experiences were like. Not many women have traveled like this and written about it.

If you had to do it all over again, would you change anything in your latest book?

Yes, I realized I had the word “road” twice in the title and probably wouldn’t have done that if I was thinking more clearly! There may be other things I might want to change, but it’s too early for me to tell since it was just published in October 2012.

You can find Rajam’s book, Travels With A Road Dog: Hitchhiking Along the Roads of the Americas  at Amazon.