I grew up in Mississippi, lived in New York in the '70s and returned to Mississippi where my wife and I published a weekly newspaper and later a literary and fine arts magazine called Mississippi Arts & Letters. We now live in Olympia, Washington. I write theater and art reviews for newspapers in Western Washington. Major influences early on were Faulkner and Steinbeck and later John Irving. More recently I've been influenced by Cormac McCarthy, Richard Russo, Pat Conroy and Salman Rushdie. I have a master degree in art and have taught art on all levels from grammar school through collage. My paintings are frequently exhibited in Seattle, Tacoma and Olympia, Washington and are in private collections all over the US. Characters in my novels tend to move around a lot, from Mississippi to New York to the Seattle area - all the places where I've lived, and the stories tend to cover large chunks of time as the characters grow up, grow old, return home and meet people from their past.