Philip Lee Williams is the author of twelve books, including The Heart of a Distant Forest , a poignant story of retired history professor Andrew Lachlan, who returns to his family cabin on the shores of a lake in central Georgia to live out his last days. During the year-long sojourn back to his childhood home, Lachlan chronicles in his journal the comings and goings of everyday life. Oftentimes tender, humorous, and painfully tragic, it artistically displays how the quiet life of a common man can become as interesting as any public figure. For his efforts, Williams was awarded 1986 Townsend Prize for Fiction. In 1991, he was also named Georgia Author of the Year in Fiction. His work has been translated into Swedish, French, German, and Japanese. In September 2004, his most recent novel, A Distant Flame , was published by St. Martin's Press, and went on to win the 2004 Michael Shaara Award for Civil War Fiction.

He is also an award-winning documentary film writer and producer, including awards from The New York Film Festival, the Columbus (Ohio) Film Festival, and the Telly Awards.

Williams was born in Madison, Georgia, and has resided most of his life around Athens. In 1972, he earned a degree in journalism from the University of Georgia then embarked on a career working for newspapers. He is married and has two children and one grandchild. His other books include, All the Western Stars (1988), Slow Dance in Autumn (1988), The Song of Daniel (1989), Perfect Timing (1991), Final Heat (1992) Blue Crystal (1993) The True and Authentic History of Jenny Dorset (1997) The Silent Stars Go By (1998) and Crossing Wildcat Ridge (1999).

Walsh: It's been about 20 years since you and I sat down to talk about The Heart of a Distant Forest and since that time you have published eleven books. You have a new novel coming out in September 2004, A Distant Flame . A lot has happened since your first novel was published in 1984.

Williams: Everything has been wonderful. I've had a good life, though I have had health problems and so forth. There aren't that many of us who have published over a period of twenty years, though, and I'm very proud of the fact that I have a novel coming out this fall, twenty years after The Heart of a Distant Forest . Life has just kind of invented itself for me as it's gone along. Twenty years ago we had one small child, and I was working in the newspaper business. Now, I work at the University of Georgia where I am an adjunct professor of creative writing. My twelfth book is coming out, and I have two children and a grandson. Life goes on, but by and large, it's been good. Being a grandparent is a wonderful thing, and I'm glad I lived to see it.

In fact, you have had some health problems, very life-threatening.

Yes, in 1994 I had open heart surgery for valve replacement. I had congestive heart failure and was quite ill even though I didn't know it. It's been ten years now and I feel fine, but it was a frightening time. It was bad and very difficult for me personally because the recovery was long, but at the same time it gave me a lot of perspective on my life and work. I had been the quintessential, driven, type-A person most for my life, impatient with everything except perfection, driven to want success as I did. The illness slowed me down a tremendous amount and made me realize that I could create things that I felt very good about, but the only person I had to satisfy was myself. Everything else, my family and friends, was vastly more important than writing.

When people are bed-ridden, as you were, depression oftentimes sets in. You were on heavy doses of medication and antibiotics to fight infection. And that did happen.

I was very sick. I had open-heart surgery, and I was warned a little bit about the effects afterwards, but as it turned out, not enough. I suffered from extreme clinical depression afterward, and I was physically fragile for two months, then emotionally fragile for another four or five months. It was just extremely hard for me to get over the effects of that surgery, and it took a long time and a lot of medicine and therapy before I finally came out of it. I don't look back on it with a lot of pleasure because it was a hard time, but it also was a time that allowed me to recalibrate my thinking. And as such, it really was a watershed because now I am at the point where I can feel very relaxed about my writing and about a new book coming out without thinking that it is a matter of life and death. I can relax and enjoy the time that surrounds the publication. I feel like I have passed the point where I need to stand up and say “I have achieved this.” This is my twelfth book, and I have reached a point in my life that is very comfortable and very nice, and the heart surgery had a lot to do with it.

Was the depression a result of your physical inability to do anything?

Actually, science doesn't really know so much about this kind of depression. It tends to attack people who had emotional problems beforehand, and I tended to be introspective rather than depressed. It's what writers and creative people do. I was under anesthesia for four hours. That's a long time, and when I came out I was in intensive care for two days. For a month, I could not do more than walk around the sofa. I had no strength to do that.

Could you write?

No. My study is upstairs at my house, and I could not walk up one step much less one flight of stairs. As it turned out, once I healed I was in far better shape than I was before the surgery. I can walk all day now, but then I didn't have the strength even to hold up a book, or the attention span. I started out by saying I would read one sentence today, then I got into one paragraph a couple of days later, then a half a page, then a whole page. That's how weak I was. So, the depression afterwards was very bad, and I managed to get through it. That's one of the things I believe heart patients are not warned enough about. I have subsequently talked to a great many people who have undergone long surgical procedures who have had similar experiences. When I wrote my book, Crossing Wildcat Ridge , which is essentially about that time in my life, I let both my cardiologist and my heart surgeon read the book before publication, because I wanted to make certain my medical stuff was technically right, and it was. But my cardiologist, who is just a wonderful doctor and person, said it really was the first time that he had intimately thought about or seen what happens to a patient from the other side of things. I think it was a bit eye-opening for him.

Let's talk about your new book, A Distant Flame .

It's a Civil War novel. I've had several interests that I have worked on my whole career. One is old people, and another is history, particularly military history. So, I have woven together both strands in various ways. The True and Authentic History of Jenny Dorset had covered the time of the French and Indian War and the American Revolution, and I had been sitting around thinking about what I wanted to do next, and some years ago, before I wrote Crossing Wildcat Ridge and The Silent Stars Go By, I started to work on a Civil War novel. I worked on it for ten years, and it got very big and very baggy, and I could not get it into shape. So, finally, about a year and a half ago I sat down over the Christmas holidays and I said, “Okay, I'm going to take an absolute axe to this. It's not going to be pretty.” I cut out everything except the essentials and started over. I cut out 140 pages of manuscript in 90 minutes. Now, I had a lean manuscript, but I realized I didn't like the protagonist at all. By chopping out the 140 pages, I removed a tremendous amount of his motivations for everything he did throughout the book. So I went back and started over, rewrote the book for what was the fifth time. When I finished it, I felt like I really had something. I was patient in working on it because I was at a point where I felt that I could take my time, and I wasn't worried about it.

At any rate, I got it in the shape I thought was pretty good and sent it to my agent. He thought it was excellent, too, that it nailed the story. So he started sending it out to New York, and it was bought fairly quickly by St. Martin's Press, and it was gratifying to have a major publisher in New York. The pre-publication comments I've gotten have been really good. So, I'm very excited about the book. It deals with the Civil War and the aging of a man and about why things happen the way they do in war. It also deals with the issues that are very current, still today, civil rights and things that are an outgrowth of slavery and so forth. In Jenny Dorset , I spent years trying to get the history exactly right. I was fanatical. But let's face it, nobody in this country knows anything at all about the French and Indian War or the American Revolution. You could make it all up and no one would know the difference. That's not that way it is with the American Civil War. There are thousands of people out there who know every single moment of every single campaign. So I had to be right. We have letters, journals, newspapers, and photographs, drawings. There is a vast amount of material of every single aspect of every single war campaign. And, this was the Atlanta campaign in Georgia. The good part was that it telescoped the focus, from May to July 1864. So, it gave me a very small canvas. Although much information exists on the Internet, I immediately set out to create my own day-by-day, minute-by-minute account of the Atlanta campaign. So I knew exactly the weather on everyday. I knew exactly where everybody was everyday, and I knew what moment the Confederate troops crossed what river and exactly where the troops were. I had to have that. You cannot guess. You cannot make it up. When I got through with all of that I actually hired David Evans, a very well-known Civil War historian who created the current Civil War museum at Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield, to read the manuscript, even before I showed it to my agent. I was unwilling to take a remote chance on errors, and he found a number of small things, but in most of the major issues of history, I had it right. In one place I had a soldier wearing boots when he should have been wearing brogans. Those are things that are important to Civil War aficionados. After I rewrote it for the sixth and seventh time, I paid David to read it again because I wanted to make damn sure. So, I feel very good about the historical accuracy of the book. Of course, some of it is speculative.

Once you cut out the 140 pages and had the heart of the book, how long did it take you to write the novel over again?

Six months after that to get it right. When I cut 140 pages I still had 400 pages left

From that blueprint, you just rewrote the story?

Totally. In fact, every page was substantially rewritten because the lead character, Charlie Merrill, was a rather dark character who had suffered some terrible traumas in his childhood. I went back and radically changed him into a much more likeable, sympathetic protagonist, and I think that is what really made the difference in the book.

Do you see this as a historical or literary novel?

It's very much literary in the way that it's written because I consider myself a literary novelist. The term “historical novel” isn't considered helpful, since so many bad historical novels have been written. And yet, even something like The Hunchback of Notre Dame was historical fiction as were many of Shakespeare's plays. Setting something in the past doesn't necessarily make it what we would call a historical novel, but it is an unassailable fact that it is that. It's just that it is a historical novel that is written in a literary manner in terms of how it is approached and set in three different time periods with the same character that unwinds simultaneously. So, it is not a straight linear novel. And, the quality of writing, I hope, is better than a simple narrative.

It elevates itself above the historical novel.

That's the hope anyway. We fail in a different ways, I'm afraid. Maybe this succeeds and/or fails in a better way than many books set in the past. I hope I have learned something after twenty years of publishing. I think I am still learning, every day, but I don't think a writer feels she or he has full and complete control over the material, not ever. History tells us this. Biographies show that as writers age they don't necessarily, and very rarely in fact do, go from one great success to another. That's not the way it works, because every manuscript you try to write or story you try to tell has its own inherent problems. Depending upon how you do it, the book may be more or less successful than the others you write.

From your first novel, The Heart of a Distant Forest , published by W.W. Norton, to your new book, A Distant Flame , published by St. Martins Press, in what ways does the publisher approach you that is different?

Well, I never thought of my writing as a “career,” per se. It never occurred to me. I never wanted to write full time. After my first novel came out, everyone was desperate to know when I was going to write full time, because to them it was equivalent to winning the lottery. They didn't know how little money is actually involved in literary fiction as opposed to commercial fiction. It never occurred to me to write full time because I didn't want to. I have my twelfth published title, and I've don't it all with a full-time job. Why do I need to write full time? So, the idea of setting up a career to make more money as time passes and to get to the point where I didn't have to do anything but write is something that was never on the radar for me. I have written books that I felt like were small-press books, and I have published them with small presses. I have books that I knew were large press, and I have published with W. W. Norton, Grove Press, Random House, and others, so I have never thought of my books as a steady climb up some ladder. All I have thought of is what I want to write next and what is the appropriate place to publish it. After I rewrote A Distant Flame , I knew it was a book that could sell in New York.

With twelve books published, have you, after the fact, thought that you published with the wrong publishers?

Sure, that crosses your mind. My friend Raymond Andrews, whom I just loved and who was a great southern writer, talked to me all the time about the relationship between the writer and the publisher. When I sold my first book and was talking about how much I liked my publisher, he turned to me and said, “Publishers are the enemy . Don't you know that?” I think he was a little bitter at the time. But writers and publishers have a historically contentious relationship. We don't necessarily feel like the publisher is doing what we want them to do. When you are young and just starting out, you think the publisher is going to do everything – throw you a party in New York and invite 700 people. That's not the way it goes. As you get older, you tend to be more understanding about the limitations of publishers.

You mentioned Raymond Andrews, and I can never drive to Athens without thinking of him because I always cross the Apalachee River, and Appalachee Red is one of my favorite novels .

I hope someone will write a biography of Ray, who took his own life in 1991. I knew Ray before anybody else in the South really knew him. My wife and I knew him when he lived in New York, and we would go up and stay with him and his then-wife, Heidi, at their apartment in Elmhurst on Long Island. He actually moved back to Athens on the publication day of my first novel, The Heart of a Distant Forest . So we were able to celebrate that together.

Ray was a great guy. I still don't know what all happened and went into his decline. I know he had been ill, and that last summer was very hard for him. My wife Linda and I were having our daughter Megan at about the same time. Ray had been in New York all that summer when Linda was pregnant, and things were really busy. I had a new book coming out, and so he and I had seen each other that summer at the American Booksellers' Association meeting in New York City, and he and I were walking back to my hotel, The Penta, across from Madison Square Garden, and Ray wanted to go get a drink at this little Italian restaurant we used to always go to in the city. I was just exhausted and I said, “I'm just beat. I'll see you back in Athens.” And, I never saw him again. Because we got back, and I got busy. I talked to him on the phone several times, the last time about two weeks before he shot himself.

This is sort of difficult to put into perspective because computers are such a huge and common element in our lives now, but twenty years ago, the personal computer was so new and untested, and people really didn't know there was a huge use for them. But I remember visiting you at your house, and after we had finished talking, you showed me your computer, and your monitor, which was an old black and white television set! You showed me how you were writing your book on this computer. I was still pounding away on an IBM Selectric typewriter. So, when I saw your computer, I knew that was the future. Well, I had been saving all my money for a trip to Europe after graduation, to spend a month or two over there. That was on a Saturday, but that next Monday, I took all my money, and I bought a computer. So, you blew my trip to Europe!

Sorry! But I'm old enough to have spent a good deal of my early career using a typewriter. Not only that, I wrote a huge chunk of The Heart of a Distant Forest on a manual typewriter. The final manuscript that I sent off to my agent in New York took three months to type on a damn Royal manual – I've still got it. I must have used ten rolls of Correct-Tape and White-Out. People not old enough to know about those days can't imagine how slow and time consuming it was. Of course, I was in the newspaper business, so when home computers first started coming out, I was one of the first writers around here to start working on a computer with the help of my brother Mark, who is very much a technical guy and an archeologist here at UGA . I was using a Radio Shack Color Computer II. I could not have remotely done what I have done as a writer without the personal computer, and of course, they've gotten vastly better.

I can remember the first poem I ever got accepted for publication, and once the poem was finished and I would make small changes, I must have type it 20 to 30 times on the electric typewriter. Just endless typing. Now when you need to make a line break change, it's easy, but back then it was a major deal – you had to type the entire poem again.

In the earliest days, the largest file I could store was about three typed pages, so, for a novel, I would have three to four hundred separate files that had to be printed individually. You could queue them up to print the next file, but nevertheless, it was an incredible pain. It'd take hours to print out a manuscript. Now it takes thirty minutes. Of course, back then I thought “hours” was a much-better time frame than months!

It's been twenty years since you published The Heart of a Distant Forest . Now, what is the first thing you think about when someone mentions the novel?

When I think back now on The Heart of a Distant Forest , I think about the fact that after the book was sold I thought that everything would change. I was very naive. I thought that anything I wrote would be published, and that I was going to make a lot of money. That's just not the way it works, most of the time. What has happened to me in the twenty years since then has been far more gratifying than if I had gotten rich and famous. That's the worst thing that can happen to a person, particularly a young person, and I think being as I was, for many years, very poor and obscure, it was much better training as a writer.

You could have made much more money with All The Western Stars had it been made into a movie. It was very close to being made into a movie with Jack Lemmon.

Actually, the truth of the matter is that I couldn't have made more money than I made on that book. We were so close to filming with Lemmon and James Garner that I got paid as if we had already begun filming. They usually don't pay until they turn on the cameras, but we were so close that they went ahead and paid me. One day I opened my mail and I had a check for $89,000. Those were nice days, but, what that meant was that the studio owned the book, the characters, everything. It didn't get made, and they already spent two million dollars on it so now anybody who wants to revive it would have to pay back the two million dollars before it could be made. Lemmon pulled out at the last minute to do another movie. Of course, he's dead now. I have a copy of the letter Lemmon wrote the director saying that he loved All the Western Stars and had been trying to get it made since the first day (which wasn't true) and “besides there isn't any movie that can't be made later.” Well, it couldn't be made later with him in it because he died. But, you know, you get over that kind of stuff. When you are young, you tend to be a little bitter when those things happen because it's like getting very close to something that passes you in the night. But that's what usually happens in LA and isn't the exception. Even getting as close as we did was the exception. There aren't very many people like Pat Conroy who see everything they write turned into movie. That's made his career. That's very, very rare. Of course, Terry Kay has had wonderful luck with the Hallmark Hall of Fame. You can't plan these things – they just happen. You move on and don't worry about it. We tried to get Alec Guinness, Brando—all kinds of correspondence exists that I treasure. Guinness said he couldn't understand why we wanted an old Brit in such an American movie.

To me, the great part of being a writer is the writing. All the rest of it is business stuff. When something great happens with the business stuff, you have two hours of happiness. When something really hideous happens, you say “crap,” and you have two hours of being disgusted. It really isn't much more than that after you have been around for a long time. You don't sit around and get ecstatic except when you write. And of course I treasure it when someone says they love my work.

The general public has this idea of writers and artists where they think that writers are actually out living the lives and the action that are written about. I mention this because when I called to schedule the interview, I called on your birthday, and you were doing something that completely destroys that myth. Do you remember what you were doing while we were talking on the telephone? Folding clothes. The normal, ordinary lives we live.

Yeah, that's my life. And that's the life I like. I have a very small life. I live seven miles south of a town of 600 people, way out in the country. We have a creek and most of the time when I go out into my yard I can hear only the wind or hawks. That's it. I have a great house and a great family, and a place where I can do my art and enjoy my life. I have never wanted to be famous, ever. I have been somewhat indifferent to money most of my life because I was always happy as a child, and we never had any money. The only thing we ever had in excess was books and music. Too this day, those are the only things I really find necessary, along with my family. I do enjoy being recognized – it would be inhuman to say I don't. And getting a nice fat check is great. Linda and I were incredibly poor for years. I mean one missed paycheck way from being hauled to the poor house, for the first ten years of our marriage. We had nothing . We were living hand to mouth. It wasn't until I started publishing books that we got comfortable. I was talking to my father about this the other day. I never once asked my parents for anything after I graduated from college. So, we made it on our own. I just want to be able to write and enjoy myself.

Have you ever thought about a sequel to The Heart of a Distant Forest ?

It's kind of bounced around in my head over the years. In a sense, Crossing Wildcat Ridge is sort of a midlife second chapter of The Heart of a Distant Forest because it deals with a lot of the same issues – the natural world and how it is reflected in a plot that is placed upon it. I had always thought that some point along the line I might want to write another story about Willie Sullivan growing up and his reflections looking back on Andrew Lachlan, the narrator of The Heart of a Distant Forest . But, to be perfectly honest, I just haven't gotten close to that happening. I have written piles of books that haven't been published, probably written 25 to 30 novels. There are things I had to write, and some are pretty good, but either the timing or the publishers weren't quite right. I am working on another Civil War novel because St. Martin's wanted me to. They have been kind to me, so I felt that the potential of following up A Distant Flame with something could be satisfying. I felt that I had not said everything I wanted to say about the Civil War yet. But I'm not going to become a Civil War novelist. After this one, I won't do it again. Maybe someday I will write a sequel to The Heart of a Distant Forest . I never read my books again, but if I had to take one with me, if I was being sent away, and I could take one book that I had written, it would probably be The Heart of a Distant Forest .

Could you discuss your teaching position at the University of Georgia?

I am an adjunct professor of creative writing and member of the graduate faculty in the creative writing program here at UGA. I teach undergraduate and graduate classes, mostly novel-writing and nature-writing. I have also taught a number of directed readings with honors students, one-on-one classes where we study certain books in-depth. We've studied everything from Hemingway's short stories to the poetry of the New York Poets – Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery and so forth. I also have served on thesis and dissertation committees and am very deeply involved in the creative writing program as a whole. It's been really wonderful for me. I found out that I am a good teacher and that I love what has been, really, my family's profession. My mother and father, brother and sister are all teachers, as is my wife. I should have figured it out long ago. I came to teaching rather late in life, although I have lectured and given speeches at universities all over the southeast. It was an amazing thing to find out how much I liked it. My students are by and large very good, and I feel fortunate to be a part of the program here.

Are students better writers than they were 20 to 30 years ago?

I think the students are better at everything now than they were 20 to 30 years, though some writing professors don't agree with that at all. The average student coming into the University of Georgia has something near a 3.90 GPA and 1300 on the SAT. I didn't approach that myself as a student when I came here as a freshman in 1968. The students are much better qualified than when I was in school – certainly. The quality of the student writing I saw this past spring was phenomenal. That's the only way to describe it. It was brilliant . I had two or three students in the class who could be writing and publishing books within the next two to three years.

It's an incredibly busy life to work as an English professor, to edit a magazine [ The Franklin Chronicle , magazine of UGA's Franklin College of Arts and Sciences], to work with students all the time, to keep up the writing career, and to have a family to look after at the same time. It's very rewarding, though, and I wouldn't do anything else. I've also kept up a steady avocation as a composer, too. I've never stopped doing that. I started out as a music major here at UGA and have always composed. And now, software has gotten to the point where you can compose at your computer and make very good sounding CDs that sound very much like orchestral music. I just finished my 17 th symphony. I've written a ton of music over the past years, mostly just for my own pleasure. I'm not looking for performances, but it's one of the things I do for relaxation.

You've always been an upbeat person, but what really irritates you?

Republicans and extremely dogmatic people. People who are angry and those who don't respect the environment. Intolerant people. I like to think that I am a tolerant person, and I like to say that people can do anything they want to as long as they don't try to tell me what to do. I like the freedom to make my own decisions. I dislike it when people try to convince me of something that I've already make up my mind on. You know, I have a pretty tolerant view of even things like popular culture. People look at all the things that go on in the world and tend to be totally ignorant of history. People who are all bent out of shape over Janet Jackson [exposing her breast] are ignorant that people have been doing things like that to promote themselves with outrageousness for several hundred years. There is nothing new about it. It has always gone on, and humanity has always endured and survived. I doubt seriously if those things mean more than a blip in anybody's life. People in general who are predicting the end of western civilization based on individual events like the Britny-Madonna kiss [at an awards show] should get a life. We are repeating things that have gone in this country since its founding.

As our society and culture evolves, do we have a better culture than we did say twenty years ago?

Better? I don't know. I'm not somebody who constantly thinks that we are going to hell because we are not quoting Shakespeare. People have always proclaimed the death of classical music. It's not going to die. We have more access to classical music now through CDs than we have ever had before because it's cheap to produce, and there are a lot of really arcane things that have never been recorded that are being recorded now. I've listened to more serious music in any one month than Beethoven ever heard in his entire life . I've read more books in a few months that Shakespeare ever read in his whole life. That doesn't mean that I can be compared to them by any stretch except as a reader, but we have access to gigantic worlds of information, especially with Google. When I asked my students a question and get a blank look, I tell them there is no excuse. You don't even have to spend two hours in the library to find the answer. You can go online and find it in fifteen seconds, though libraries should remain central to all our knowledge.

When I interviewed Joseph Brodsky in 1992, he stated that distribution was one of the main problems with publishing, and for him it was geared toward poetry. We've always had problems with distribution, but the solution keeps evolving, and with the internet the problem has really been solved. You can download classical music or poetry. That type of distribution or access as never been available.

It's going to keep evolving. I'm not one of those people who hate technology or thinks that e-books are somehow evil. E-books have not worked so far, but the main reason is that the receptacle for e-books is not comfortable to use. When that's solved then e-books will be read, and the paper book will be downplayed dramatically, which may not be so bad. We have to cut trees to do that. But there will always be books. There will always be paper and cloth-bound books simply because people love the aesthetic experience of having a book in their hands. I think bestseller-type books and genre books will be eventually turned into e-book- driven formats. That will be fine. When they produce an e-book that is back-lit beautifully and is aesthetically pleasing with the same feel to it that a nice book has, then it will happen, then that paradigm shift will have occurred.

One thing I think is worth saying is this whole idea that “information wants to be free,” is really a threat to creative people. I bought my house and put my son through college on the basis that information does not want to be free, and there are certain things that are worth paying money for. If I work on a book like A Distant Flame for ten years, I deserve to be compensated for it. I don't think a book deserves to be basically stolen from me. With musicians, you are generally talking about a three- or four-minute song that can easily be put online. People are not doing that with novels, yet, simply because it's too much of a hassle to download, and there's not a market for doing that. If there were, they would have already done it by now, and I would have been fighting that. I think my copyright should ensure that I get paid fairly for this work. People just tend to think that it's “just a song.” Well, they may think the information should be free, but the creation of that information is not free. We work very hard to do these things, and there should be fair compensation.

Now, I will add that many CDs have been scandalously, if not criminally, over-priced for years. Paying $17 for any CD, particularly with 35 minutes of music on it, is outrageous. It's making multi-millions of dollars for people who don't deserve it in the first place, and it's marked-up to help stabilize and market their careers. The public shouldn't have to pay for career development. We should pay for the product. $17 for a CD is pretty outrageous. It's also hard to convince someone to pay $25 for a book, but when you look at it, the authors are not getting rich off of that unless you sell a hundred thousand copies. The publishers are losing money on most books they sell at $25 a copy, but people don't realize this. Just selling it for $25 doesn't insure that they are going to make a penny because the break-even point is five to seven thousand copies. Most books don't sell that much. There are highly regarded literary writers in this country who are considered Nobel quality who sell three or four thousand copies of a book. People think a good sale is a million! There are only a handful of people like Stephen King who do that.

I agree entirely with you regarding copyright; however, isn't the price of CDs a result of market forces driving the music industry? I mean, if people don't want to buy the CD they don't have to, and if the music industry companies have slow sales that should influence the price so that the price is lowered if in the least to stimulate the sales. The same holds true for novels and books of poetry as well as any other free-enterprise item that is for sale in the competitive marketplace.

Sure, that's true. But the price isn't set based on sales. It's based on inherent costs, and there are some costs a buyer should absorb, but the career development of other artists for a label shouldn't be one of them.

In 1989 I called my high school to find out about our 10 th year class reunion, and they gave me the name of the girl heading it up. It was a girl I knew from my history class – Renee White. So, while Renee and I were talking about the class reunion, she asked what I was doing and I mentioned that my first book was being published and would be out in a few months. She told me that her husband had just finished a novel and was hoping to have it published. Now, I did not say this to her as it would have been incredibly rude, but at the time, I thought, “Sweetheart, don't even think that he has a chance of getting a first novel published. It's next to impossible.” Well, a lot I knew. Renee had married John Grisham.

The same things happened to me when I was out talking with Charles Frazier. We are distantly related through marriage, I think, and we were having a beer after an autographing I had done in Raleigh, and Cold Mountain had just come out. He was asking me if someone calls up and wants to do a phone interview, is that something he should do? About three weeks after that he was a multi-millionaire. And now he just sold a new book for an $8 million advance based on a two-page description. At that time, he was still teaching part-time at college, I think. I couldn't be happier for him, but what a strange thing to happen!

Talk about a paradigm shift in your life!

I'm not allergic to money – I'm not a purist who thinks that if you make money you can't be an artist. I'd love to be rich, but that is really not the payoff. The payoff is the book. It's always the book. Some books pay off more and better in terms of your satisfaction than others. I've had books that I still feel very close to and others that have over the years faded out of my daily thoughts. Right now I feel good about A Distant Flame. It's a book that's very close to those things that interest me in my life, and it's nice to be able to write about things you love.

Have you ever given much consideration to what you would change in the world if you could?

If I could wave a magic wand it would be to make all people respect everyone else's culture and religion without feeling a necessity to change it. It would be to convince people that religion belongs in churches and not in government. We are essentially at war over religious convictions. We still have the fundamentalists who believe what they believe so strongly that they want their views to be legislated so that everybody has to believe what they believe because they know they are right. That has for thousands of years been one of the most destructive things in the course of humanity – the absolute intolerance coming from people that believe what they believe both through joy and also through fear. A great many people who are dogmatic are dogmatic because they are terrified, not because they love. If I could do anything I would have everyone respect everybody's feelings without the necessity of making it a law.

Is there anything that I have not asked you that you would like to talk about?

Just that as a writer over the years and with all the books I've published, my goal has always been for my work to make its way and for myself to be more or less anonymous. Of course, I'm sitting here for an interview, but I just don't have a lot of personal need to be famous. Never have, never will. I live a very small life, and I live a small live intentionally. I go home from the university in the afternoon and I have my family and my books and my music, and I have my woods in the country, and that's what I want. The idea of having to do things that are adjuncts to fame are ultimately boring and horrifying. I can deal with it when I have to be a public person. It's not so bad especially with the genuine affection people give to you because they like your books, but I am a solitary person by nature as a great many writers are. I'm never looking for a magazine cover or anything. When it happens I try to be as gracious as I can. I have a website coming up mainly because I have a new book coming out that I want to promote and sell because I need to make the money from it. I have a daughter who has to go to college. But I also want a better way to get in touch with the people who care for my work. The website is a much more subtle way than traveling all over the country signing autographs in book stores. This will allow me to do it from the comfort of my home. That seems to be a nice compromise.