Novelist, journalist, professor:
a trifecta, a hat trick, a trinity.
It’s all about words. The narrator of my second novel, Eddie And The Cruisers, is called Wordman. That’s what I am, too. I’m the longtime Writer in Residence at Kenyon College. I work as a journalist, most recently and frequently for National Geographic Traveler. And I write books, seven novels – two more on the horizon — and two books of non-fiction. What it comes to is this: I live to write. And my life isn’t complete... isn’t really lived... until I’ve written about it. That’s not a shrewd job choice. It’s my character, my fate.
Films are my wild card. I don’t travel to Hollywood and, since moving to rural Ohio, haven’t seen more than twenty films a year.
And nothing that I have seen has changed the two films I’d take with me to a desert island:
The Wild Bunch and The Blue Angel. It’s been good to see a LIFE Magazine article I
co-wrote turned into Dog Day Afternoon and my second novel become Eddie And
The Cruisers, the film. I’ve watched all this from a distance. I’m not in control, once a
book is sold. But I like the way movies give my work renewed life, and permit me to think —
and sometimes say — that I was there when the pages were blank.
