Q: What did you write in your fellowship year?

A: I started writing a murder mystery called OUT IN THE OPEN, from an epigraph from Henry Miller's The Air-Conditioned Nightmare.

There are experiments which are made with cunning and precision, because the outcome is divined beforehand. The scientist for example always sets himself soluble problems. But man's experiment is not of this order. The answer to the grand experiment is in the heart; the search must be conducted inwardly. We are afraid to trust the heart. We inhabit a mental world, a labyrinth in whose dark recesses a monster waits to devour us. Thus far we have been moving in mythological dream sequence, finding no solutions because we are posing the wrong questions. We find only what we look for, and we are looking in the wrong place. We have to come out of the darkness, abandon these explorations which are only flights of fear. We have to cease groping on all fours. We have to come out in the open, erect, and fully exposed.

I finished the book and sent it to New York, to Harper, Row, to the mystery honcho there, Joan Kahn.

I started another book, an autobiography about how I became an writer. The autobiography told about my having my desk moved out into the hall in the 6th grade, and me having to listen to the teacher's lecture over the transom, and tell time by a shadow on the floor. I thought that this showed I was an outsider early.

Actually, I was denied crayon privileges the first day of school.

The first book came back rejected. By then I had finished the second one. I sent them out together. I started a third book, a dialogue between the hero of the first book, the campus cop, and the hero of the second book, me. A dialogue between author and character.

I combined all three books, named the book OVER THE TRANSOM, and sent it out.

Over the transom means unsolicited. Books that come in over the transom are said to be in the slush pile. Slush is thought to be worthless.

Q: That was your first book? OVER THE TRANSOM? A mystery, an autobiography, and a postmodern conversation between fictional character and author of the fiction?

A: Yes. Then I started a second mystery, with the same ensemble cast. I was writing a police procedural. A series character. THE SOLID GOLD PECKERWOOD. About a murder on an archeological dig.

My delivery bike, Dreadnaught, was a character in this book.

Q: Art Brew went out to the charcuterie for forcemeats. On his bicycle.

A: Yes.

I got hired to be the crew chief on an archeological dig in New Iberia, at Shadows-on-the-Teche. We excavated the slave quarters.

Henry Miller had visited Weeks Hall at The Shadows in The Air-Conditioned Nighmare.

Nights of, "camellias and hallucinations." From dark-roast pure-coffee and talk. Hall was a raconteur. He'd been in Paris. They talked about Paris. Art. Scuffling. Being a flâneur.

I called this book I REMEMBER YEATS. From an epigraph from Ezra Pound. "I remember Yeats: All my life I have been trying to avoid rhetoric, and all I did was replace one rhetoric with another."

I was reading a book called The Rhetoric of Fiction.

This story was told in different voices.

I had change bars in the margins in different colors to indicate the time period of the voice.

This was before personal computers, and the capability of changing fonts. I only had one typeface on my typewriter. Not even italics or bold. For italics, you underlined it.

Q: My God.

A: I read Keep the Aspidistra Flying. Apropos of poverty.

Q: My God. That was some first year.

A: I would start a book, finish it, send it out, and start another book.

The second one would append itself to the first one. I would rename it, and send them out together.

I combined autobiography, fiction, and criticism, or literary theory, in a single book. Later poetry, letters, and self-interviews.

From the start.

I followed the writing where it took me. Rather than imposing some a priori form on the writing. Writing within a defined genre.

I didn't wait for a book to be accepted. I pressed on to Boulogne.

Later, I replied to rejection slips in the books.

I got mad.

I pissed and moaned.

I gnashed my teeth and bayed at the moon. Wolves a-howlin'.

Q: And Hemingway was working on The Transatlantic Review. To suck up to Ford Maddox Ford. A person he disliked.

He was kissing Gertrude Stein's ass.

A: Yes. Working the literary levers. Being a careerist.

There is the career, he said.

To get out of a contract with Boni and Liveright he savaged a novel by his old friend Sherwood Anderson. To break the contract so he could go with Maxwell Perkins at Scribner's.

He wrote The Torrents of Spring, a parody of Dark Laughter.

And Anderson had helped him with letters of introduction, to people in Paris.