leave their generational homes is so powerful, even today.  I taste the dust of that dried up land and the sweat of those itinerate farmers every time I read it.  I love Flannery O’Connor and Joyce Carol Oates their use of improbable story made believable by their ability to craft the unbelievable into something real.  I read everything that Lee Smith and Jill McCorkle put out.  They are writers who work with the contemporary south and all its symbols.  Jill is of my generation and so to read her stories is to read about my youth, growing up with the Temptations and peroxide summer hair at Myrtle Beach.  Lee reminds me of folks I knew from a distance, more like foothills folk, or just good old country folk, mysterious and wonderful in their uniqueness.  Saving Grace is a very important book to me for the way she crafts character.  Both of those gals are great storytellers who I have sought out to read my own writing.  And I remember Gail Godwin’s book A Southern Family was one of those that hit it just right, the story, and her language, the way one leaves the south and when forced to return must learn to accept things as they’ve always been.  That’s one thing certain about the south, when you come here, you better be ready to change because the south ain’t budging.  It was a book that made me want to be a writer early on and tell my own stories.  And of course Reynolds Price and Fred Chappell, poets who write fiction, have meant a lot to me as a writer.  Now everyone knows these fellows write great poetry as well as stories, but what I mean is that their language is so wonderful, its rhythms, the way the narrative flows onto the paper, it is poetry in story form, I think.  Both men are so tender with their characters, so respectable and true to them.  I try to read a little of Chappell and Price before I start writing something just to remind myself of how it really should be done all the time.  But probably one of the most influential writers that I can think of for me is Lewis Nordan.  He writes with a kind of magical realism in his stories that I think is so important.  He can spin a yarn and make it so unique.  I mean just read Wolf Whistle and you will know what I’m talking about.  And I keep a copy of Music of the Swamp near my desk so if I get stuck or feel my own creative sensibilities waning, then I just stop and read some of Buddy’s stories and I feel like I am being baptized all over again.  I know I have gone on here, but I have been influenced by a lot of writers because I have stopped and taken the time to read before I ever started writing anything. 

Your love for reading is obvious and not just southern literature but others too.

Sure, you’ve got to read everything that you can get your hands on.  Reading is very important. 

You said that you participated in creative writing workshops, tell about that.

Well that is the place it seems to always start, a workshop of some sort.  Whether it’s in a creative writing class in school or outside of a classroom, people seem to always go to a group to learn about their writing. 

Do you think that is good or bad?

I think it’s a great way to start, as long as you understand how to take what is given to you.  You have to remember that a workshop is usually filled with people who want to be told they are writers, good writers, and so when real criticism comes, good criticism that can really help a writer understand the problems of a story or novel, sometimes it goes