Some people want to call me an Appalachian writer, even though I know some people use regional labels to belittle.

When you have an idea for a story, you want those characters to reach as many people as you can. I think you normally think of prose as a way of doing that. It fits our time, the culture.

Among the American contemporaries I read with most enjoyment are several North Carolinians. I think the best poetry being written these days is being written by Southerners.

In the later books I am much more at home in the use of language to describe things. I had never thought of that until a critic pointed that out.

Our most famous writers are Faulkner and Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor. It would make sense that the poetry would reflect some of those same values, some of the same techniques.

Philip Larkin has a tough honesty and sense of humor that I find irresistible, as a contemporary poet.

Young writers find their first audience in little magazines, and experimental writers find their only audience there.