After a year, it was great to get out of L.A. and return to Hyde Park. Since my grandparents lived in Hyde Park, I had been coming there since I was a tyke.

I thought that you had to learn to write by yourself and if you couldn't do it, then you were out of luck.

I do different work, teaching and running around visiting universities and bookstores, and that prevents me from writing. But it's nice to be wanted as a writer.

For 'King Cole's American Salvage,' I rode around in the wrecker with a local driver and watched him deal with customers and hook up the cars. I watched the guy who tore apart the cars in the junkyard. I also wrote poems about those guys. I loved hanging around the yard.

I always felt a weird obligation to be adventurous.

Drugs and drinking affect every family I know, country and city, middle-class and poor.

I can't personally drink or fight too much nowadays because I have to be perky in the morning in order to write.