The One-Man Iris Davis Fan Club by Dan L. Walker

7/13/2025

Multi-volume, historical fiction and teen and young adult fiction author Dan L. Walker introduces us to his latest book, “The One-Man Iris Davis Fan Club”:
Sam Barger returns in this Classic quest story set in the 1960s with a damsel in distress, a reluctant hero, and a journey into the unknown. Sam pursues his dream of commercial salmon fishing but soon finds his whole life turned upside down. The One-Man Iris Davis Fan Club takes Sam out of his familiar Alaska home on a mission across the West into a world he has only read about. Once more, Sam has to think on his feet and adapt to new surroundings as he tries to do the right thing.

A fabulous, coming-of-age story set in a turbulent period of American history!
The author has done a wonderful job of bringing the characters to life. They are all on point and serve the plot ever so well. The activities of daily living seem so authentic to the situations Sam finds himself in.
I have never run a gillnet or anything like that, but I might even survive the first day based on what I learned in the book.
I give 4.9 stars to this marvelous and touching story! I am picky about certain things.

You can buy this book:
https://www.danlwalker.com/index.html
https://www.amazon.com/One-Man-Iris-Davis-Fan-Club-ebook
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/the-one-man-iris-davis-fan-club-dan-l-walker
https://www.goodreads.com/-the-one-man-iris-davis-fan-club

You can connect with the author:
https://x.com/DanWalkerAuthor
https://www.danlwalker.com/index.html
https://www.instagram.com/dlwalkerak/

Copyright © Mark L. Schultz 2025, except for the author’s introduction.

28 Comments

Dan Walker link

7/14/2025 11:30:18 am

Good morning. It's great to start the day with positive feedback.
DW

Mark

7/14/2025 11:58:30 am

I agree completely! I really enjoyed reading your book. As a teenager living in the southwest corner of Washington state, I dreamed of living in Alaska for a time.

Thanks for joining me in the interview.

First question.

Please, tell us more about yourself. Perhaps something a little bit beyond your bio.

7/14/2025 01:01:57 pm

I was born in southern Ohio, number six of seven kids. My mom was a Kentucky briar hopper and my dad a poor farmer. We moved to Alaska in 1958 and homesteaded on the Kenai Peninsula. I tell that story in my book Letters From Happy Valley. I worked as a cook and a carpenter as a young man, but spent most of my life in education, teaching public school.

7/14/2025 01:46:38 pm

I am the oldest of three, plus a half-brother from our stepdad. You were pretty young when your dad moved the family to Alaska. Homesteading was a dream for several generations and drove the expansion of our country from coast to coast.

New question.

What was the best part and the worst part of homesteading for you as a little boy?

7/14/2025 02:38:41 pm

I loved the life we had in our log cabin the woods. It's was a young boy's dream. The best part was all the things I learned such as gardening, building, tending chickens and rabbits, and butchering game. Life was a great adventure. The worst part was losing my father when I was eleven and that meant leaving the log cabin in the woods and moving to the city of Anchorage. A whole other adventure. All those experiences help me as a writer. The freedom and isolation contributed to my ability self- reliance and contentment in being alone.

7/14/2025 04:22:10 pm

That was very exciting for a young boy! I grew up on rural farms and spent a lot of time hiking over hill and dale. But I doubt that compared to homesteading as there was always a small town only a few miles away.

New question.

Is the homestead still in the family, or did it go to someone else?

7/14/2025 05:25:46 pm

The thirty-five acres is still in the family. Unfortunately the log cabin burned many years ago and the land has gone back to the wildlife, which is not a bad thing. I was only there for seven years of my life but it was the kiln in which my personality was fired. Since then I have built two homes and a remote cabin, but none imprinted me like that place in Happy Valley. I'm sure that partly because that is a formative time in a child's life, and the time I had my father before he died.

7/14/2025 08:34:16 pm

Those years, though few, were very important in your life.

New questions.

Are you a full-time or part-time writer?

What kind of work do you do if you are a part-time writer? Feel free to skip that question, if you would rather not answer.

7/14/2025 08:43:11 pm

I am a retired school teacher who started writing seriously about twenty years ago. I drafted several novels during my teaching years, writing in the summer and when I felt the urge. When a story is churning in my head writing is fun, and I would miss sleep to work on writing. Since my retirement, I still have to wrap my writing around the rest of my life, but I can spend some long chunks of time writing when I choose.

7/15/2025 08:32:49 am

Retirement is not the lay back in your recliner and take it easy time people think it is. I am quite busy. As you have found, we can choose what we want to do most of the time. Grandkids get high priority, especially when you live with them.

New question.

What are your three favorite genres to read for pleasure?

7/15/2025 12:42:20 pm

When I was young I loved adventure stories and historical fiction such as Treasure Island, and Mysterious Island. I still read a lot of historical Fiction, but I also enjoy well-written non-fiction about unique places and events. Some of the best non-fiction writers are journalists. They tend to be efficient and direct in their use of language.
Most of my book choices come from the shelves of the second-hand stores. RIght now, I'm reading Delilah by Marcus Goodrich, a dense novel about a Navy Destroyer and its crew before WWI. We'll see if it proves out.
A third genre I will read is modern crime fiction by Elmore Leonard who creates interesting characters and clever dialogue. I read a lot of Mike Hammer and Marlowe books (the hard-boiled, tough guy detectives) as a teen and find Leonard reflective of that style.

7/15/2025 02:50:35 pm

I loved the same kind of stories when I was a pre-teen. Some librarian must have suggested a science fiction book, and I was hooked! I read as much as I could get from our small-town library and the even smaller school library. Between them, there was plenty to choose from.
In eighth or ninth grade, I was given a set of The Lord of the Rings by Tolkien. I was flabbergasted with the tale, the writing and especially the languages! I read the series three times before graduating from high school.
I read more science fiction also, Asimov, Herbert, Bradbury, and others I can't recall now.
My four favorite genres are currently sci-fi, fantasy, historical fiction and cozy murders. I have reviewed quite a bit of the last two on my website elsewhere.
Goodrich's book sounds quite interesting to me.

New question.

Has writing changed the pleasure of reading for you?

7/15/2025 08:03:24 pm

I think writing has affected my reading, but I don't think it's a negative effect. Perhaps it has made me a more intolerant reader who is more aware of shabby writing or tired tropes. It may be my age or experience contributing to my reading behavior as well. For example, these days I will drop a book like a hot rock if I don't like the writing or if I'm not engaged.
Good writing will keep me reading even if the topic is not of particular interest to me. More than vise versa. Even if I like the content the writing has to be strong for me to stay with it.
I read more as writer than I used to. This means that I think about the techniques the writer is using or how they structure a scene. I try to learn about writing by reading other writers. For example, I was reading Farley Mowat's A whale for the Killing, and I was so impressed with his descriptions of the physical and social geography of the communities that I reread several passages to both enjoy and learn how he did it. Reading is a useful workshop for writers.

7/15/2025 08:43:07 pm

More than one author has said that if you want to be a good writer, you must read a lot.

I am easily entertained and am tolerant of weak writing. But I do have limits. I seldom leave a book in the DNF pile.

New questions.

Why do you write?

Do you also journal?

7/16/2025 12:28:14 am

I don't journal regularly. When I was teaching, I kept a pretty steady journal about my teaching and my students. Now I only journal when I travel or get some flash of inspiration. I try always have notebook with me though, because there are times when I really want to write some story idea or preserve a good sentence or two.

7/16/2025 12:25:04 am

Why do I write?
I write because if I don't those stories will disappear. All those stories in my head are queued up waiting to be told.
I write because I want to be read.
I write because I think it's something I'm good.
I write because I enjoy it (most of the time).
I write because as long as I can remember I have made up stories to entertain myself, and since high school I've been writing in some form or another.
I write because it gives me pride to create something that others admire.
There are so many reasons to write. Interestingly. There are just as many reasons not to write.

7/16/2025 10:22:04 am

Many writers keep an idea journal. I have recommended such to authors to preserve ideas for later use. I suspect that many make notes on their phone. I do that sometimes, also.

Some authors have moaned about losing ideas. One woman told me her muse visits her regularly at 2:30 in the morning. She keeps a notepad and pencil on her nightstand. Sometimes she can even read her notes when she wakes up. Another author said her best ideas come to her in the shower; she lost so many because she couldn't retain them until she could get out and record the ideas. I recommended she get an outdoor notebook that has waterproof paper and a Fisher Space pen because it can write underwater and at any angle to take into the shower. I have one of those pens also.

A lot of people think about writing a book. Some even try and write a story or memoir, but they don't get far beyond a page or two. The reality doesn't come close to their ideal. The same thing happens to most people who write a few chapters or even a complete first draft. Only a few go through the process of rewrites and actually publish.

Congratulations are due you, Dan. You have done it not just once but several times. You are a winner in my book.

New question.

Does your work, past or present, have any influence on your writing?

7/18/2025 02:43:00 am

The biggest effect my work has on my writing is the thirty years I spent in education teaching children and then teachers. I learned most of what I know about writing from teaching writing and studying how to teach and assess writing. I learned so much about story and language by helping others construct their writing. Students I worked with became models for character and dialogue in my writing. They also motivated me to write stories they would want to read.
I still help people learn to write and in fact, I think I'm a better teacher than I am a writer.
The students I worked with over the years we

7/18/2025 10:24:46 am

The students I worked with over the years were models for characters in my stories and examples of honest dialogue that I try to replicate in my writing. As someone once said, all good fiction is true.

7/18/2025 10:36:07 am

Fiction has to be believable, unlike reality, at times.

Authors write what they know, even if it is only what they have learned about people by watching and interacting with them. Historical fiction is a great example. Few people wrote detailed accounts of the events surrounding the Viking invasion of the British Isles. We have a fair amount of reasonable facts as provided by the victors, but we know those facts are always somewhat tainted. Since human nature has changed very little in thousands of years it is not too hard to infer sub-surface goings-on and daily life for most people. Many great stories have been written in that way.

You certainly had a rich gold mine of people to work with as a teacher and then a teacher of writers.

New questions.

Who was the first person to inspire you to write something to publish?

What inspired you to write this book?

7/19/2025 07:19:08 am

The first thing I ever published was stories in my high school newspaper. Mrs. Grant was the journalism teacher, she made me the sports editor and taught me the inverted pyramid structure for news stories. Traditionally, the important facts of a news story are in the first sentence, and the information gets less important as the story goes on. Traditionally, editors cut stories from the bottom so if they ran out of room they didn't rewrite; they just cut off the end. Like Joe Friday, I learned to write "Just the facts."

Now, over fifty years later, I am still writing and trying to write clearly and succinctly even in my fiction. This novel, The One-man Iris Davis Fan Club, came about when I decided I wasn't finished with Sam Barger (it's pronounced with a hard G like burger). In the novel Back Home, Sam has a girlfriend for a while, and she's a strong, vibrant character, strongly based on a girl I was friends with in high school. It came to me one day in flash, "Iris gets pregnant." --This is not a spoiler because this is how the book opens. i wanted to write a book about teen pregnancy in the 1960s, and I wanted to write it from the boy's POV. This story takes Sam out of high school and into the unsteady world of the 1969 with the Vietnam War, lots of civil unrest, and a generation full of rebellion. The original title was Do The Right Thing, but while writing the last chapter, I realized that Sam was a One-man Iris Davis Fan Club. I love these kids, but I ready put them through hell.

7/19/2025 08:19:39 am

I wrote a couple of sports articles for our small-town newspaper without getting any training. I think I wrote two. The publisher was swamped but he didn't ask me to write any more.

You did put Sam and Iris through the wringer! I bet you are familiar with an old version of a clothes washer that had a wringer to squeeze water out of the clothes before they were hung on a clothes drying line. That was a scary device.

New questions.

Why did you choose this genre, or do you feel the genre chose you?

Will you keep writing in the genre or will you branch out?

7/20/2025 11:46:22 am

When I started writing Secondhand Summer, I had already written in many different genres but mostly short pieces. I wasn't thinking of genre or audience when I started writing. I just told a story. After the first draft, I started thinking about who the audience was and how I would change it to please young readers. I've always thought of the Sam Barger books as stories about young people in a certain time. And the fact that this reads like 'young adult Historical fiction' is coincidental actually.

7/20/2025 01:53:00 pm

I never thought about this story as historical fiction, but it certainly is because it's set in a particular period of time. Many writers create stories that aren't anchored in time; thus they are evergreen, they never get stale. Times change but people don't. I find the story very relatable because I grew up in that period of time, graduating from high school in 1971.

New question.

Have you ever seen a UFO or UAP, Unidentified Aerial Phenomena?

7/21/2025 11:12:02 am

Never seen a reportable UFO. But got to know the son of the man named Brasel who was at the heart of the Roswell incident. His stories were fascinating. And I’ve written a middle grade fiction draft about kids finding a UFO in the desert.

7/21/2025 12:28:12 pm

I bet his stories were fascinating! The Roswell incident has not ceased to fascinate people after all of this time. Many books have been written about UFOs and Roswell either as a primary subject or incidental mention.

I hope you publish that book.

Last question.

Have you ever seen a cryptid, an animal unknown to modern zoologists, or found evidence of one?

7/21/2025 12:50:21 pm

Haha. I’d have to look up the meaning of that word if you hadn’t explained it. I’ve been nose to nose with a brown bear (through my window) and nearly squatted on a coral snake, but never got a look at big foot or his ilk. I’m a skeptic.
Thanks Mark. This has been fun.

7/21/2025 01:21:11 pm

I have never seen a cryptid either. I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, and Bigfoot is hiding behind every tenth tree, if my friends in high school are to be believed. They all claimed to have an uncle who saw one.

Thank you, Dan, for hiring me to promote your book. Not only did I enjoy the story I have enjoyed chatting with you this week.

Until next time, keep on writing.

The One-Man Iris Davis Fan Club by Dan L. Walker

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