Where did you grow up, and how did this influence your writing?
I was born in Mississippi in the late 1940s and was 15 years old when the Freedom Summer came to Mississippi. This effort was a voter registration drive to allow the blacks in the South the right to exercise their constitutional right to vote. The year before in 1963 in Birmingham, Alabama, water hose and dogs were set loose on Blacks marching for their civil rights. The KKK had bombed a Baptist Church and murdered three small Black girls. Times were violent​ in the South in 1964.
When did you first start writing?
I began to write in 1990 on an electric typewriter in South Mississippi on my days off from flying helicopters in the Gulf of Mexico. My first book was a special ops​ helicopter story which still has not seen the light of day.
Read more of this interview.