Q: You wrote your first three novels in New Orleans. Is that right?

A: I finished I REMEMBER YEATS at Penland.

John showed it to his publisher for me, but it came back with a form letter rejection slip.

I REMEMBER YEATS. Digging the slave quarters at an antebellum plantation in New Iberia, Louisiana. Shadows-on-the-Teche. Henry Miller visited Weeks Hall at The Shadows in The Air-Conditioned Nightmare. Nights of "camellias and hallucinations."

Then, in four years, I wrote six more books, which concluded my first series, The First Nine Novels.

I worked at several manual labor jobs.

THE SHADE OF THE ASPIDISTRA. Move to the mountains of North Carolina to live poor and write. The allusion is to Orwell's Keep the Aspidistra Flying. Weeks Hall's English setter, Molly, is buried under an aspidistra bush. Mr. Hall, he loved that brown molly. Southern code for miscegenation. Work as potter's helper, laborer in a feldspar mine. Brenda pregnant with Owen.

RACE, SEX, AND LIBEL. The pamphlets Playing Hurt and Trailer Park Tramp were printed up by Larry. A section on the books in my life and a postscript are unpublished. I was working construction. Which meant we'd moved to Winston-Salem, then to Mocksville. Work as press brake operator in factory that builds industrial air-conditioners, the only white guy on an all-black crew.

E PLURIBUS UNUM. Working as a janitor in a department store. Book is about going from New Orleans, where the sold-out Super Bowl is being played, to Biloxi, to watch the blacked-out game on television.

LOONY TUNES. An essay. A summing up. We hadn't moved back to Florida yet. Looking forward to the 9th novel (counting REJECTED POEMS as a novel).

REJECTED POEMS. Poems written at the winemaking/cheese-making shop, Homecrafts; unemployed; working construction; unemployed; working as a carpenter's helper; unemployed; press brake operator trainee; unemployed; janitor, from which job I was fired for stealing six rolls of toilet paper and a gallon of floor wax.

THE NINTH NOVEL. I can't find this one anywhere. I don't remember the title, and don't know how long it was. It was written after we moved back to Florida, and were living in the back bedroom of Brenda's mother's house, Brenda and I and Baby Owen, and before I got my technical writing job and started writing my chronicle.