The fecundity and flow of the country will be with me always; after all, I was indirectly raised on the rolling acres of my grandparents' farm in Virginia, with horses and cows aplenty and real bass and bluegill in the lake out back. It took William Faulkner, however, to show me time, death, sex, God and language intersecting in the red clay and the tree-line of a farm. Perhaps I'm channeling Dewey Dell when I say, "I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth."