I started writing fiction in 1977--short stories exclusively, on the theory that the genre lent itself to trial and error.  Ten years later, having published a handful of stories in literary periodicals and magazines, I put ten in an envelope and sent them out "over the transom," with a cover letter addressed to "Dear Editor."

After a couple of rejections, I got a phone call from an editor at Harper & Row.  The Country Ahead of Us, The Country Behind was published in 1989--my first book.

The ten stories are stylistically diverse and various in voice and approach.  Some were written in the basement of a house I rented for $75 a month, some in a mobile home, and one in a borrowed corner of a summer home overlooking a bay.

I've always liked the cover art on the original hardback jacket.  Apparently the warehouse in which the majority of those hardbacks were housed burned to the ground, making them rare.

These stories are full of a romantic intensity.  I was broadly influenced at the time of their writing and trying on voices and forms.