Sometimes I stop and try to figure out where the stories come from and why I write the way I do. I'm sure much of it is a result of the land I grew up on and the people who were trying to scratch a living from it. One of my earliest memories is of a large fire in the middle of the cotton field. It was wintertime, and I was helping Daddy burn chunks of stumps and roots that had accumulated during the crop season. It was a new ground farm only recently drained and released from the clutches of the brackish water of a Mississippi bayou. The soil was buckshot - rich, black, and grainy - unlike the light-colored, sandy loam of the old Delta.

But the type of soil doesn't matter. If he stays in contact with it long enough, the land will brand a man as surely as the red-hot iron brands a Western calf. I'm sure the flat, almost treeless bayou-studded Delta of my early years - and later its replacement, Mississippi's rolling, red-clay hills - both placed their marks on me. My family had long been people of the soil, and although I chose another profession, I have always been aware of the pull of the land.

And then there were the people - those quirky, down-to-earth folk who saw the world and their place in it through a different set of lenses. My family tree had plenty of these sitting on all the branches, and there were plenty more just down the road or over the hill. And in our rural society, they could not hide. Everyone knew them and knew all about them. And the stories of their quirky escapades and misadventures were told and retold until they took on lives of their own. For, you see, that's the way the common history was kept alive and where much of our entertainment came from - through the stories.

It was the Depression, and very few areas were as economically depressed as the rural South. The road in front of our house was dirt (mud when it rained), and with no electric lights and no plumbing, we lived a bare and stark existence.