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

Being five-foot-ten at fourteen years old was a little bit scary.

I was unhappy and I couldn't figure out what was the matter. And he told me to go take a writing course. And I didn't even know that one could learn to write in writing courses.

I'm not much interested in my own self when I write. I'm interested in what I observe out there, what's going on around me.

There were a lot of beautiful, thin people out there driving nice cars. It was a whole different experience being in L.A.

That's where I live, a junkyard in a neighborhood of junkyards. We have three tractors from the 1940s and '50s, several old pickup trucks, and a pile of scrap metal.