Another author I met at the Festival of Books in the Alleghenies is political thriller author Michael Fedor. We spoke about his experience as a political operative and how it has shaped his writing today. He was first a schoolteacher and then a political operative. Our conversation can be heard below.
Fedor has worked as an operative for John Murtha and Mark Critz’s congressional campaigns. He became disillusioned by the political process and what it does to people who work in it. He was influenced by the film The Candidate where Robert Redford plays a man running for the U.S. Senate who becomes the very thing he despises after he wins.
He has an admiration for Teddy Roosevelt. His novel is named after Roosevelt’s Bull Moose Party. Surprisingly, in 1912 it managed to finish second in the popular and the electoral college vote ahead of William Howard Taft’s Republican Party.
Michael Fedor became a political thriller author after he was disillusioned with the electoral process. He feels that his books are a way to get people to think about the political process rather than to emotionally react to it.