Better Know An Author – Noel Anenberg

Our weekly spotlight series on authors from around the world. This week we sat down with Noel Anenberg!

Please give a brief introduction, including your name and where you are based

I’m Noel Anenberg. After selling a business I operated for 30 years, I returned to my alma mater, USC, and graduated from the Professional Writing Program in 2003. Since graduation I’ve been writing and teaching Inside Out Writing at Pierce College Los Angeles. I also host a monthly Salon for novelists in our Encino, California home.  Additionally, I am a freelance contributor to the Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The American Thinker.  

What book or books have you published or are working on at the moment?

Along with several screenplays, I’ve published two books, THE DOG BOY, the memoir of a black Texas sharecropper who travels to Los Angeles, California in the Fall of 1945, to care for her dying Marine son. My other novel, THE KARMA KAPER, a romp, tells the story of twin brothers, one a con artist the other a schlemiel. They are B- Hollywood movie producers who have failed to pay off their marker with the Armenian mob and are running for their lives. 

I am currently at work researching a crime novel about the trial of a 14-year-old boy who shot his 15-year-old classmate to death in their homeroom class. As the trial proceeds we learn the ugly truth about this tragedy.  

What drives you to write?

I am an only child who grew up in the void between an alcoholic father and an addicted mother. I had no one to talk to and no one would listen. I was alone. 

I found my closest friends between the covers of the books I read. Br’er Rabbit taught me how to use my wits to survive. Tiny Tim, David Copperfield, and Pip became fast friends whose stories comforted me. I learned bravery from Huck Finn and found an intimate brother in Holden Caulfield.  In later life I discovered Christy Mahon, a young Irish lad, who killed his brutal father and was cheered in John Synge’, “Playboy of the Western World.” Still later I discovered that Charles Dickens, himself, and Sir Winston Churchill suffered desperate childhoods in the hands of neglecting parents who consigned them to dingy boarding schools and soul grinding factories where children worked 12-hour days seven days a week. 

I discovered that I could trust in the written word to express myself. The written word may not be erased. 

Then, I read about Winston Smith 6079 in George Orwell’s masterpiece 1984. Through Winston I realized how precious the voice of the individual is and that realization has equipped me to be true to myself, to stand my ground, and to resist tyrannies like the current WOKE Revolution. A sinister movement that is nullifying the existence of Free citizens, erasing our democratic heritage and our history, trying to limit our language, banning books, separating us from our faith, destroying our nuclear family structure, disconnecting persons from their biological gender, foisting the belief that hard work and success are racist, and controlling citizens’ thoughts in order to create a faceless civilization of people detached from their souls. Citizens of blind faith who will attend HATE rallies just as their fellow citizens in Oceania. 

I am a Manichean who believes there is Goodness and Evil and that we humans must chose to be either Good or Evil each day of our lives. 

I see life as a continuing passage from light into darkness. We know not what the next moment will bring. There are those who will lead us into to the light, those design to keep us in the dark, and the mass of others who follow blindly. 

Through my art I hope to bring light, love, Goodness, and laughter into the lives of my readers and students. 

Where can folks find you online and on social media?

My website can be found here.

What is one piece of advice you would give to another author out there who might be struggling?

What counts are words on pages. Our emotions fluctuate wildly, our thoughts often run amuck so try to maintain a disciplined writing practice in which you show up to work every day and write your quota no matter what you’re thinking or feeling. Be kind and patient with yourself, be loyal to your vision. 

What are some of your five-year goals with writing?

There is no telling what the future will be. I try to stay present in each moment and take the next step as it presents itself. There is always something to do. 

Final thoughts?

Writers are unable to control how agents, publishers, and the reading public will react to their work. Better to remember always that your worth is not in the words you write but in the soul, you were born with. Stay true to yourself. Enjoy life. Love. Trust in your higher power. 

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