A: Well. I met a lot of interesting people, like Jim Harrison who lived up there. I got into writing again through Jim and I was also fascinated with the birds. I was very interested to see that Jim was making a life for himself as a writer -- he was a poet; he hadn't written any novels at that point. He was very helpful to me. But I think it was more simply seeing that it was possible to be a poet or a writer in this society that was really helpful. I was very impressed that he was publishing poems, he had a book out. About 1968, I felt like I had to start doing something with my life other than being a carpenter. So I decided to go to the University Of Montana to get a wildlife biology degree. I think I had a romantic notion of becoming a naturalist. Since I hadn't completed my bachelor degree at Wayne, I completed it at Montana in wildlife biology. But once I got to Montana, I met all of these writers -- guys like Jim Crumley, Jimmy Lee Burke was out there, Bill Kittredge came along and Dick Hugo who was a very prominent poet.

Q: Did you ever become a biologist?

A: No. After I got my bachelor degree I really decided that I was going to be a writer, not a biologist. I couldn't see a future as a biologist. I wanted to write novels. I was writing fiction, but I hadn't published much. Kittredge encouraged me to go to the Iowa Writers Workshop. I was there for a couple of years, I had a fellowship and I was building houses during the summer. I was trying to write novels, but you know the writers workshop doesn't really help you if you're a novel writer. The workshop is more or less designed for short kinds of work such as a poem or a short story. So, I wasn't really getting to anything. In the meantime I got my MFA based on some short stories I wrote. At the same time I was attempting novels but I wasn't getting very far. I was typically getting to page one hundred or something like that. It's kind of a breaking point for a novel. The initial storyline has been pursued to a certain point, not quite exhaustion, but maybe you've become bored with it, or frustrated. There's a powerful urge to cut to the end . You do not know how to go on with it and you become more or less permanently stalled. It's pretty typical. So you start introducing extraneous elements and you lose track of the storyline. Just all kinds of problems that budding novelists have, and this wasn't being addressed at the writers workshop and I think that's still the case. They can't really cope with the novel.

Q: So what did you do?

A: I was at a party and I was talking to David Morrell. David was a professor of English at Iowa, not part of the Writers Workshop, but with the phenomenal success of First Blood , I think he may have been finding the company of writers more congenial than that of scholars -- David was a well-regarded scholar, especially in the field of modern American literature. I was complaining about this [my novel writing problems] to David and he said maybe I should try a genre mode, like a mystery or thriller. He said the form itself would give me some guidance. He asked me if I liked mysteries and I said I loved them. I had been reading Simenon and people like that for years and I just love that kind of fiction. He said, take one of those as a guide and see if you can write a crime novel. So I did. In thirty days I wrote a novel and gave it back to him, and he read that thing and made notes on every single line it seemed. He sat down with me and went over it page by page. He told me what to look out for and he kind of let me know that what I have to do as a writer is to develop some self-critical skills. I think that is very important for writers. He also gave me some guidelines I could use. He gave me a lot of good advice and I was thrilled. He said that he thought it was a pretty good novel and why don't I make the changes that I can. So I rewrote it, paying very close attention to everything that he told me. I relied upon him. I gave it back to him within a few days and he sent it to his agent, Henry Morrison, in New York. Morrison said that it was publishable and that he would take me on. I thought this was terrific and I fully expected to get it published. Well, months went by and I didn't hear anything. In the meantime, I would write and when I needed money I would build houses. A year had passed and I decided that the first novel wasn't going to sell. I was working on a new novel that I called Hearts Are Broken. I had incorporated some elements of the first novel into it and it ultimately became The Diehard. I sent it off again and nothing happened. Several months went by and I decided to go to California. It was wintertime, so I decided to go down there and work. I was down there several months and I was wondering if Henry Morrison ever got anywhere with that novel, so I called him up. He said, "Where the hell have you been? I sold the book to Random House." I said, "Holy Christ!" I immediately told him to send me the money. You know, he sent me the money and I bought a pick-up truck and drove back to Montana, and I've been writing up there ever since.

Q: After The Diehard and The Blind Pig, there was a large gap of time before Grootka was published in 1990. What were you doing during that time?