friends who’ve stood by me and always inquired as to how things were going, but I think they have always recognized me more as a college professor than a writer. 

Being a college professor was considered a real career?

Exactly, a real, more concrete type of career.  You could see the legitimacy of teaching.  You know books are everywhere, but for some reason when you say something like “Think I’ll write a book,” most people don’t believe you will ever do that, because most people don’t.  Books are something someone else writes.  We buy them, but we don’t write them, you see.  So needless to say, it took me a long time to be able to really believe I could do it.  Lots of lonely hours writing.  You know I would come home from work, eat dinner with my wife and then kiss her good night, say good-bye and go to my second job at my desk until all hours of the night.   And when you are writing something that has no audience yet, that has no one expecting it, and perhaps has those distracters out there who are wishing you to fail as much as any well wisher is wishing you to succeed, well you get pretty depressed sometimes and its easy to lose faith in what you are doing. 

So that happened to you?

Which time do you want me to talk about (laugh).  Yes it happened numerous times.  And I think there were many times as well that I tried to stop writing, tried to put obstacles up in my way just so I could have an excuse to put it all away. 

But you didn’t put it all away.

No, and thank God I didn’t.  I think a writer is going to write and now I call myself a writer.  I’ve run that gauntlet and have come out on the other end, whole and renewed and with a contract for my book!  Whew! 

And now you move on.

Yes on to the next project. 

Before we talk about that though, let’s keep chatting about how you got started as a writer, what helped you learn your craft?

Well, when I was living in LA, I was reading a lot, a lot of novels.  I read John Updike, John Irving, Pat Conroy, John Steinbeck, Hemingway, Robert Penn Warren.  While I was still out there, Larry Brown got started with Algonquin and shortly after Big Bad Love came out, a guy from Mississippi with whom I was taking a workshop gave me the book as a present.  He liked my writing and thought I could learn something from Larry’s stories, so I read them and fell in love with his writing.  Think I have read almost everything he’s written. 

Are these the writers who have influenced you most in finding your own voice?

Yes, those and others.  I love Updike and Irving and Conroy for their sense of geography.  I actually tried to write my first novel after reading Conroy’s Prince of Tides.  And John Irving’s work, its uniqueness of place and character was always on my mind while I was writing When the Finch Rises, and Steinbeck too, my goodness, Grapes of Wrath.  That first chapter where we watch the land die and then the sharecroppers being forced to