FREQUENT QUESTIONS
Why the South?
 
“Write what you know” is still the best advice for a writer. Although I had a couple of chances to move to New York during my newspaper days, I never gave it serious thought. I’m the son of a Birmingham trucker, and I have no business (or interest) in writing about any other part of the country.
What are your favorite books about the South?
 
Oh, my. To Kill a Mockingbird will live forever. Willie Morris’s North Toward Home is my favorite memoir.
Favorite novels? Southern or otherwise?
 
The Grapes of Wrath is still the Great American Novel, in my mind. For sheer technique, and the style of writing I most admire, I have a thing for Leonard Gardner’s one novel: Fat City, about prizefighters trying to get by in the San Joaquin Valley of the ‘fifties.
Can writing be taught?
 
No. One of my favorite quotes is from Harry Crews: “I went to [college] not to be taught how to write, but to learn how to make a living while I taught myself how to write.” I teach, and I try, but all I can do is stir the talent that might lie there; show how hard it is, teach some tricks, scare the hell out of ‘em. You learn to write by doing three things: reading, writing, and living so you’ll have something to write about.
Your greatest influences?
 
When Jimmy Breslin moved from sports to writing a general “street” column for the New York Herald-Tribune in 1963, I saw new possibilities through what was being called the New Journalism. His taut 1,000-word human dramas were literature, right there in the newspaper, and that’s what I wanted to do. So it was Breslin and Hemingway and Steinbeck for me.
Why do you write?
 
The record will show it’s not to be rich and famous. I’d be happy to be remembered as one who left some stories behind, fiction and fact, that accurately reflected my time on earth.
Your toughest book to write?
 
The Ballad of Little River. Five white kids got drunk and torched a black church in the swamps of south Alabama. Nobody was happy to see me move into a fishing cabin and ask questions for six months, trying to find out why, but I finally broke them down. I figured it was time to go when I woke up one morning to find my tires had been flattened. Too late, bubba.
Why sports books?
 
Again, write what you know. Sport is a stage, packed with drama and all of the human emotions – dreams, verities, morals, victories and defeats – every bit as legitimate a palette as, say, the life of a traveling salesman. I wanted to write about loss of innocence in my first novel, Long Gone, and I figured what better way than to throw a wide-eyed kid into Class D baseball with a broken man like Stud Cantrell.
Your most treasured award?
 

Oddly, it’s a Lifetime Achievement award from a library in suburban Atlanta. “This is what you get for outliving everybody,” I joked to my wife, but I took it seriously. You don’t just think about writing – you do it, every day, come hell or high water – and it was sweet to be recognized for that.
Personal rewards?
 

The prettiest book jacket I’ve ever had graces this latest novel, Nobody’s Hero, and it’s the work of my youngest child, Martha, who just graduated in graphic design from American University in Washington, D.C.
Are books doomed?
 
Not until they invent a word processor you want to curl up in bed with.