The first eight years of my life were spent in a mountain village in Calabria, the next three in an orphanage in a rust belt city in upstate New York, and from age eleven, I lived in Southern California when it was good to live there, the Pacific Ocean was a fresher, clearer shade of blue, and the San Fernando Valley was more Linda Barrett than Nora Desmond. My life was shaped by the diverse cultures of those areas and by the great waves of global migration following the Second World War of which I was a part. The challenges faced by immigrants to the United States prior to the war have been well documented. Postwar immigrants were confronted with a socioeconomic landscape much different than the one faced by the earlier arrivals. It's that difference that I am trying to tell a story about.

I can be myself without having to worry about conforming to the rules of the gatekeepers.

The first story I wrote was titled Mysterious Caverns. I was fourteen and reading a lot of science fiction at the time. The Junior High School I attended decided to publish a school magazine and invited all the students to write something. Even students taking shop courses (e.g., metal shop, wood shop, electric shop) and were in remedial English classes, like I was, were included. My story occupied two of the four page magazine. The guidance counselors (gatekeepers of a different sort) decided to yank me out of the shop courses and place me in academic courses, and the hook was in.

The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury.

The act of writing itself. I am always writing. Whatever I experience, I am concurrently thinking of writing about it.

I sit in front of the laptop in my man cave and confront the blank page. I look out the window, and if it is autumn, for example, I watch the leaves fall. I quickly succumb to temptation and go outside to be among the falling leaves. Then I putz around in my garden and think about the blank pages. I come back to the man cave and sit in front of the laptop. The blank pages are still blank. Believing in solvitur ambulando, I put on my hiking boots and visit any of the numerous waterfalls in the nearby forest. I sit at the base of the waterfall and think: I should be writing. I go back to the man cave and sit in front of the laptop once more, take a few deep breaths and finally manage to string together several words. They don’t look right, so I string together some more words. If fortunate, four hours later, the sentences may have turned into paragraphs, the paragraphs into pages.

Had you asked me this question ten, twenty or thirty years ago, the list would have been different. Right now, these come to mind:

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Any of the Border Trilogy by Cormac McCarthy
Black Boy by Richard Wright
Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown
Christ Stopped at Eboli by Primo Levi
Ham on Rye by Charles Bukowski
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Of Wolves and Men by Barry Lopez
Ask the Dust by John Fante

The answer to this question would also have differed over the years. As of this moment I would have to answer James Joyce, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Charles Bukowski.

Mystery novels: Andrea Camilleri, Henning Mankell, Stieg Larsson, Michael Connelly, Robert Crais, Hakan Nesser. Anything by Elmore Leonard, Jhumpa Lahiri, and all of Bob Dylan.

Hiking, photography, woodworking, drinking wine, cooking, basketball, the gym, gardening, traveling, drinking more wine, watching foreign movies.

The Salvation of Salvino Quipal was inspired by my fascination with the paranormal, mystical experiences, the temporal lobe of the brain, schizophrenia, the Pacific Ocean, Big Sur, road trips, and the unsettling suspicion that rational thought alone cannot always discern what is real from what is not.

An action adventure novel set in the Los Angeles of the Sixties titled Tapestry. The action centers around an immigrant who is willing to risk everything, including his life, to recover his mother’s bequest from a violent drug dealer.