As with many Southern Writers, I believe that the special quality of the land itself indelibly shapes the people who dwell upon it.

I came across a photograph of him not long ago... his black face, the long snout sniffing at something in the air, his tail straight and pointing, his eyes flashing in some momentary excitement. Looking at a faded photograph taken more than forty years before, even as a grown man, I would admit I still missed him.

The Halifax area has long played a major role in Canada's military operations, being the port of departure for convoys, naval task forces and army units over the past 100 years or so.

My mother's people, the people who captured my imagination when I was growing up, were of the Deep South - emotional, changeable, touched with charisma and given to histrionic flourishes. They were courageous under tension and unexpectedly tough beneath their wild eccentricities, for they had and unusually close working agreement with God. They also had an unusually high quota of bullshit.

When a writer knows home in his heart, his heart must remain subtly apart from it.

The dog of your boyhood teaches you a great deal about friendship, and love, and death: Old Skip was my brother. They had buried him under our elm tree, they said-yet this wasn't totally true. For he really lay buried in my heart.

As with many Southern Writers, I believe that the special quality of the land itself indelibly shapes the people who dwell upon it.