eral, I was going to ask early on were you a reader of music magazines, and that type of thing, because I know in my particular case, that was one of my biggest influences was the writers in these magazines. I don't know if that played into your life or not. Well, It did. You are little older than I am, but when you and I were younger, a Rolling Stone or a Creemmagazine, they were influ- ential because they was so timely. And I tried to track down what was of interest to me, like the Paris Review, I kept an eye out in those days, you know how it was, there were no computers, so you really did have to go to the book store and go through these magazines and sort through even what was close to what you thought was good, pull it out and not throwing any genre under the bus, we all have our particular taste, so yeah. But I certainly wasn't influenced by magazines as much as I was books and albums. That is why The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones was sorta like a bolt of lightning- because I've always loved music, and I always loved literature, but that book married the two and it was like wow! Here a writer from Waycross who’s with the Rolling Stones, and he's talking about the Okefenokee Swamp and he is sit- ting next to Keith Richards, so Keith knows the Okefenokee Swamp, and it just ties every- thing together and that was like the early 80s and I was like 15 or 16. So Stanley Booth is in the book. And I eventually tracked down Harry Crews, which that was certainly a dose of literary reality. There were no writers around here, I didn't have anyone that read as much as I did, so coming across Stanley Booth was certainly an awakening.


In talking about you writing different types of literature, you have a novel ti- tled the Local Stranger, a very good novel.


Thank You.


What inspired you to write The Local Stranger, when did you start it and how long did it take you to write it? Honestly, those stories, except for one, were written around 20 years before they were published, most of them anyway. That is how I started, that is what I wanted to do was to be a fiction writer. I was so young that I didn't realize that just because you are good at something or you want to be good at some- thing that you will necessarily be able to keep the lights on, so for me early on I was really a fiction writer. I wrote for little newspapers, I caught on to that is how you can make the money, the fiction. to be able to tell a story that is fictional but universal to everyone, with a feeling of redemption or loss or be- trayal, It was just fascinating to take stuff from your life, and turn it into fiction. That book was really written in the


90s. Then, after 20 years doing journalism, these stories still stand true. So I picked out ten stories of these characters that were time- less, there are more than that, I want to, I think that book really is one of those books that catch up years later, The stories were very real.


As a writer, you write about what you know, I remember Steven King saying that, that is why everything of his takes place in Maine. You write about what you know. If you write from the heart like you did there, there are going to be people that have gone through similar situations so it's that identifiability there. I found situations in that book that I said "yeah man, I've felt that be- fore, I've been in that situation,” and I just think that is the key. That's right, I think it is a matter of just mov- ing the reader's heart there is only four or five stories that you can tell and the reader is al-


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