The Man With the Barbed-Wire Fists

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Get a writer talking about himself and he’ll eventually come around to the question of genesis. How did he become a writer? When did he know that storytelling was the path for him, and why? As a reader I love those kind of questions. Give me a short story collection with biographical notes or story introductions, and chances are that I’ll read that stuff before I ever get near the fiction. I can’t help myself There’s just something inside me that needs to know… and right now.

So it’s only fair that I give you my answer to the genesis question up front. Not so much the how, when, or why I became a writer, because I’m still not exactly sure about the answers to those questions.

I can tell you the where, though.

I became a writer at the drive-in movies.

Let me tell you about it.

If you were born in the late fifties, like I was, drive-in movies were a big part of your growing-up experience. I visited my first drive-in before I could talk, figure around 1959 or so. Yeah. I couldn’t talk, but I could cry. And my brother, who was around ten at the time, wasn’t exactly the kind of kid who sat still easily. Between the two of us, our parents would have had their hands full at a walk-in theater.

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