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Forty percent of the United States drains into the Mississippi. It's agriculture. It's golf courses. It's domestic runoff from our lawns and roads. Ultimately, where does it go? Downstream into the gulf.

Seven of my novels take place in the Southwest, in the Four Corners area which has been my home since 1973. I know these mountains, rivers, mesas and canyons well, so it's been natural for me to draw on my own personal experiences here.

If you write a book about a bygone period that lies east of the Mississippi River, then it's a historical novel. If it's west of the Mississippi, it's a western, a different category. There's no sense to it.

I was always very aware of the nature of the place where I was growing up in Gulfport, Mississippi, how that place was shaping my experience of the world. I had to go to the Northeast for graduate school because I felt like I had to get far away from my South, be outside it, to understand it.

I'm from northern Virginia, but I grew up next to the West Virginia border, so it was hills and farmland. We had that sense of adventure you get from growing up around old farmhouses and lazy, rolling hills, you know?

The South Downs of England reminded me a bit of my Old Virginia homeland.

I live in Hamburg; that's in the north. And I live on the outskirts of town. It looks like countryside.

I grew up in Kilmichael, Mississippi. It's a dot on the map 100 miles north of Jackson.

I wanted to get out of Mississippi in the worst way. Go back? What I want to go back for?