The first session was hosted by Michael Lister and his publisher, Ben LeRoy, Tyrus Books.

Lister's latest book, Double Exposure, was a love letter to Northwest Florida, and the Apalachicola River Basin.

The area was threatened by development, water-use issues, upstream (the City of Atlanta needed the water for its suburbs, and cities along the river, starting with Atlanta, used is as a garbage dump, for toxic fluids, sewage, heavy metals, dead pickaninnies), overpopulation, economic stagnation, bad schools, underfunded libraries, too much television and dog fights and shopping malls and traffic, automobiles, the automobile, if anything would despoil paradise it would probably be the automobile, the internal combustion engine, highways, concrete.

So conservation was important to people who wanted to save what they had.

LeRoy, formerly of Bleak House, had visited Lister, and come to love the area, too.

The profits of Double Exposure were being donated to foundations that encourage conservation.

Lister told how much he loved the natural beauty of the area and wouldn't live anywhere else.

He talked about how the region had its negative side. Like racism.

Provincial, Pyle thought. Close-minded. Xenophobic. Smug.

A mean little state-prison town, next to a closed-paper-mill town, and close to a tourist-trap, tacky strip-club, bumper-car and concrete-Tiki-god bungee-jumping town.

The airmen from the base with foot-long dicks. Perpetual hard-ons.

Lister talked about how their featured guest, Michael Connelly, had come to own L. A.

He was as closely identified with Los Angeles now as Raymond Chandler was in his heyday.

He listed other authors identified with towns.

Robert Parker's Boston, Dave Robicheaux's New Iberia.

Walker Percy's New Orleans, Pyle thought. Charles Willeford's Miami.

Lawrence Block's New York.

Lawrence Block had three series set in New York, Pyle thought.

He didn't raise his hand and say anything.
If they wanted to hear from him, they would have asked him to co-chair the session.

Evan Tanner, Bernie Rhodenbarr, and the hit man, Keller.

Plus Matthew Scudder.

He wrote a stand-alone mystery, Small Town, in which New York City, after 9-11, was a character. Was the sticking-plaster that held the cast together.

From an epigraph by John Gunther. "It meets the most severe test that may be applied to definition of a metropolis--it stays up all night. But it also becomes a small town when it rains."

Pyle took a seminar from Lawrence Block once.

Write for Your Life.

He was writing for his life.

He wasn't winning but he hadn't lost.

He was writing.

Are you writing?

That was the test.

Not are you published, do you make a living at it, are you rich and famous?

Are you writing?

Pyle was writing.

Douglas Fairbairn and Mexico Beach, Pyle thought.

In Down and Out in Cambridge, Douglas Fairbairn, author of Street 8, tells about how his father canned coquina broth in Mexico Beach to sell up north.

When Pyle dug in Port St. Joe, the crew used to swim at Dixie Belle Curve after work every day, between Port St. Joe and Mexico Beach. And catch coquinas. And make broth.

Now, that area was WindMark Beach.

The St. Joe Company, Joe, got the state to reroute Highway 98 around the housing project, so locals couldn't trespass.

Apropos of development.

Coquinas also known as periwinkles.

What was local when Joe could get a road moved?

Periwinkles? Blue crabs? Oysters?

Stalking the Blue-Eyed Scallop.

You won't stalk it here, buddy-ro. This is private property.

Pyle realized he sounded like the hitchhiker in Five Easy Pieces, wringing her hands, and saying, "Filth."