Author Answers with Clyde Edgerton

Say hello to this week's author providing some answers, Clyde Edgerton.

Edgerton hails from North Carolina. Reviewers, critics and others in the know about books have compared his work which describes life in Southern small towns to what Garrison Keillor has done for the North with Lake Woebegon.

Edgerton is the author of Raney, Walking Across Egypt, The Floatplane Notebooks, Killer Diller, In Memory of Junior, Redeye: A Western, Where Trouble Sleeps and Lunch at the Picadilly.

1. Place you do most of your writing:
Right hand corner of the couch in the sunroom.
2. While you write, do you do anything else (munch on carrots or drink tea or listen to heavy metal, for example?)
No.
3. What author(s) inspire you?
O'Connor, Welty, Faulkner, Hemingway, Twain, Larry Brown, Lee Smith, Jill McCorkle, Cormac McCarthy, Malena Moring, Milan Kundera, Faulkner, Cervantes, Voltaire.
4. How long did you have to work before your first book was accepted for publication?
Five years.
5. What made you keep working until it was done?
I enjoyed reading what I was writing. I thought it was good work.
6. You're classified as a southern writer... would you consider yourself a southern writer and how does that label impact or not impact your writing?
I write out of my experiecne, observation, and imagination, and thus my surfact subject matter is often by definition "southern." The label doesn't bother me one way or the other. It may effect readership. Some people may avoid reading me because they'd like to avoid the south and don't care to look for universal meanings beneath a southern surface. Other people think the south is quaint and cute and thus they like "southern" writing. I'd like to think that both these responses are extreme--though I'm not sure they are.
7. How did you feel when you first saw your name on the cover of a book?
I felt very happy. A dream I was once afraid to have had been realized.
8. If you had to actually live the life of one of the characters in your book(s) who would you want to be and why?
That's a hard question for me. I'd say. . . Stephen in Where Trouble Sleeps--because he's the youngest main character, and that would leave me more time to live, but considering that all the characters will always be the same age, and alive, in a sense--I still pick Stephen, because he's young enough and in a place where he's experienced and understood love, but has not experienced despair.