Tell us about your background. You grew up in the South, went into the Army, became a writer. How did you go from one to the other? Why?

I was born in Millport, Alabama, in my grandparents' house, and we lived in and around Millport until I was seven, when we moved to Mississippi. In those days…

When you have really loved a woman,
you come to know how little you know that woman.
It is what you do not know about her,
this magical body, magnificent mind,
this soul you have drowned yours in,
who throbs to the very seasons,
blood ebbing and flowing with the moon,
that stops you dead in your tracks…

When Miz Sarah Maye, eighty if a day,
witnessed a wild assault upon a sow,
a judge summoned her to report
on what she’d seen of that odd union.
And this she did, in delicate terms,
choosing carefully her words
as she described his bold ascent
onto the fence and then over
to the other side, landing…

It was with no clear intent of malice that Gerald Roper trespassed across Mr. Earl Palmer's pasture that night and with bait balls formed of cheese and white bread and lined neatly on a piece of waxed paper sat crouched in the shadow of willows on the bank of the fishpond, an artesian-fed paradise where fishing was and always was forbidden, and flung…

When at last she paused to take a breath and the words ceased tumbling from her face, red and angry as a blister, she stood stiff behind him picking at the front of her blouse, white as Easter, as if she kept finding tiny specks of something on it, though he could see nothing, close as he was. The only blemish he saw when he turned to look was the…

I grew up hating crows. I can't explain it for sure, but anytime I saw those glossy black bastards, my blood picked up temperature and speed and I hurried home to get a rifle or shotgun and nail as many as I could before they got out of range. For a fact, if one settled anywhere on my father's property, small as it was, he was asking for a killing,…

As any writer who is on the road a lot will tell you, that road can get long and tedious and lonely, and sometimes it's all you can do to keep your mind on the things that matter: your woman back home, your dogs, your tractor, the 1500 miles of concrete and asphalt that lie between you and Willis, Texas.

I have finally come to the point in…

I failed. I'll admit it. I sat down the other day and tried to break open new ground in the book review, to widen the form, and the attempt collapsed miserably. How, after all, do I explain to you the moment when I was at Applejack's drinking a morning pitcher of beer with a one dollar egg and cheese breakfast sandwich, reading Paul Ruffin's New…