I grew up in Asheville NC in the shadow of the inestimable Thomas Wolfe.  I spent a decade in Brooklyn and scribbled more stories than I can count while riding the 25 cent Staten Island Ferry back and forth across the NY Harbor in hot summers. At present I live at the edge of the Great Smoky Mountains, and often hole up in a cabin in the woods to write when the need takes me in its grip. On a high shelf in a dark closet in my house are the unpublished novels, stories, and poems I cannot bear to discard, and even more have been reduced to ashes in the garden where stories go to die.