By Cara Jepsen
Warr had come to Chicago from San Francisco. When he was small his family lived in the Hunters Point projects, and he’d been raised as a Jehovah’s Witness. “We were always reading,” he says. “We had home Bible study Monday night, public study Tuesday, home study Wednesday, and theocratic school Thursday, where we were trained in public speaking and how to go from door to door and respond to objections. Friday nights we studied Awake! magazine, and Saturday morning we distributed from door to door. I say that’s where I got my marketing skills.”
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In 1984 he was arrested in Addis Ababa after the police found his name in the notes of a source who’d been taken into custody. “I remember dropping my wife off at the Economic Committee for Africa at the UN,” he says. He soon noticed that he was being followed. “They arrested me and took me to the Jubilee Palace, where they interrogated me for two nights. What was really scary was that I didn’t know what was up with my wife. I talked my way out of it, just like I talked my way out of fights in Hunters Point.”
Warr was then working full-time as a technical editor at a trade publication, Telephony magazine, and he estimates he’s worked 18-hour days for the past decade. For a couple years he was executive director of the Writer’s Voice series, a reading and writing program sponsored by the Duncan YMCA, and he completed two writing fellowships at the Ragdale Foundation (an artists’ retreat in Lake Forest), served on several boards, put together two collections of poems, and worked as a consultant for various arts organizations. He also got divorced and remarried, to Patricia Zamora.
Sometimes Warr still answers his phone “Guild Complex.” Looking back, he says Guild Complex’s success came in part from a combination of fiscal conservatism and artistic experimentation. “If you’re not keeping up with what’s new, or you’re missing out on what’s happening, you can stagnate,” he says. “The way to do that is by isolating yourself in a tower where what is new is not welcome. The way to avoid it is by mixing it up–by experimenting and having someone like Sara Paretsky reading with student mystery writers on the same stage.”
