Craig K. Collins is a journalist and author of Thunder in the Mountains  and Vietnam War Saga Midair who attended Bishop Union High School. Recently I was able to interview Mr. Collins about his story and success as a journalist and writer.

Mr. Collins grew up in numerous western towns throughout his childhood.  At age fourteen, he and his family moved to Bishop, CA. Mr. Collins started his first year at Bishop High as a freshmen  and although he had numerous trials and tribulations, he enjoyed high school. He had a great group of friends and always found something to do – hiking, fishing, mountain climbing, skiing, or floating the river.  He ran track and cross country and was on the varsity team that won two CIF Championships in cross country (1976 and ’77.) Mr. Collins also stated that another great aspect of growing up in Bishop was that he had some really talented teachers, opposed to most schools in a rural setting.  He recalls a number of teachers who had degrees from prestigious universities such as UCLA, U.C. Berkeley, and Smith College, who were attracted to the beauty and activities in the Sierra.

During Mr. Collins’ senior year, he joined Bronco Roundup because of his love for writing and because a couple teachers influenced him. Mr. Collins shared his experience: “We had a great journalism teacher named Mrs. Martinson and a talented group of kids who put out the paper. It was a real roll-up-your-sleeves experience. One of my jobs was to write a column called “About Campus”. I was a bit of a class clown and enjoyed making people laugh. The “About Campus” column had a long tradition with the Bronco Roundup and was meant to be written in a breezy, witty style. I would gather seven or eight funny, interesting, and even a little gossipy stories about what students and teachers were up to around the school. There might be something about an epic snowball fight or a cross country runner who got chased by a bull or a Bishop High kid who rode up the chair lift at Mammoth with Joanie Cunningham (Erin Moran) from the t.v. show “Happy Days.” It was sort of like a precursor to Facebook, if you think about it. The Bronco Roundup was way ahead of its time.”

After high school, Mr. Collins attended college at San Diego University. After working as a journalist and then a public relations and marketing executive for a few years, he decided to pursue a career in business because he explains that “the pay and job stability in journalism was much lower than the money I could make in corporate marketing. So I went back to school and got my Masters degree in Business Administration from SDSU. I hold a BA in English and an MBA.”

Mr. Collins wanted to be a writer since he was about 7 or 8 years old. He always loved to write and always had a fundamental talent for it. He got into journalism not specifically because he wanted to be a journalist but because journalism gave him “a venue and a platform in which to write, gain experience and to hone (his) talents.” What he really wanted to do was write novels.  He  said that F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby when he was 24, so he figured he’d better “get on the ball if he wanted to write the Great American Novel before he turned 25.” However, when Mr. Collins graduated from college, he looked in the help wanted ads in the newspaper and was shocked that there were no jobs listed under the heading “novelist.” So he got a job as a reporter at Copley News Service, which was a division of the San Diego Union. There he learned an incredible amount from the group of reporters, writers, and editors.

Later in life, Collins wrote his first book, Thunder in the Mountains, which is  a non-fiction memoir of sorts. In this story, he writes of his experiences living in small towns in Nevada and California. Mr. Collins describes this memoir as “a part coming-of-age story, part social commentary, and part expose on the tragedy of gun violence in the U.S. — particularly in the rural West. It was supposed to be a 900-word piece on the senselessness of gun tragedies and was based upon the burning anger, rage, and all-consuming sadness I felt following the suicide by gun of my son’s 15-year-old best friend — a tragic event that affected me deeply. I began writing and simply couldn’t stop.” Mr. Collins wrote Thunder in the Mountains in about four weeks.

In Mr. Collins’ new book Midair, he writes the exhilarating survival stories his uncle had endured as a Vietnam War pilot. One of these stories consists of his uncle flying on his first combat mission in June, 1965,  when his B-52 collided with another B-52. Fortunately, Mr. Collins’ uncle ejected at the last second just before his plane exploded beneath him. Unfortunately, his uncle was flying over Super Typhoon Dinah, a category 5 monster storm with 185- mph winds and 70-foot waves. This novel is packed with extraordinary stories as Mr. Collins explains furthermore about his uncle: “He almost died 20 times in 20 different ways, but he was eventually plucked from the ocean and went on to fly 318 other combat missions. He’s the only pilot to fly combat in Vietnam from the first bomb dropped in 1965 to the very last in 1972. He’s the only pilot to fly the B-52, F-105, and F-111 in combat. And he’s surely the only pilot to have ever parachuted into a category 5 storm and lived.”

Finally, Mr. Collins put the writing experience into perspective for me. He explained that writing isn’t easy, no matter who you are, but with continual practice and improvement, you can become a better and better writer. He shared some advice he learned from Ray Bradbury on becoming a great writer, who told him, “Write something every single day.  I challenge anyone who writes something every single day not to produce at least one good piece of writing. That’s the only way I know to become a good writer.”Lastly, Mr. Collins would like to thank all readers out there, because without readers, there wouldn’t be writers.

Craig K. Collins, Ben Holland, Bishop Union High School, Thunder in the Mountains, Midair, writing