There are a lot of writers from the South who would probably have once figured they needed to go to New York to make it who have stayed closer to home - people like David Joy, Tom Franklin, Sheldon Lee Compton, Wiley Cash, Mark Powell, and Alex Taylor.
One of the reasons I write about religion is due to my own envy of people who truly feel the presence of god in their lives, good souls who believe devoutly in a supreme being and an afterlife.
The biggest influence on my writing, besides snagging some ideas about black humor, was that the paper mill had a program where they paid 75 percent of the tuition and book [costs] for employees who wanted to go to college part-time.
I started going to Ohio University when I was in my mid-thirties, ended up with an English degree when I was forty.
Probably because I personally knew at least six or seven people in Ross County who died from overdoses in the last three years. The heroin epidemic is just too aggravating and sad and unsettling for even someone like me to live with and think about for the time it would take to write a book dealing with it.
I'm not sure I would have ever decided to try to write when I was forty-five if I hadn't already gotten that degree [in English].
[Degree in English] gave me a little more self-confidence, to know that I'd managed to complete something like that.
I look upon [writing about religion] as a nice way to get by in this precarious world, though I've never been able to do it myself.
I don't really think the outburst is recent; there have always been writers in Appalachia.
I think my characters - well, at least a few of them - are hoping or searching for some kind of contact with god.
