I'm a renegade Mississippian now living in the Pacific Northwest. My latest novel, Visual Liberties, is the final book the the Freedom Trilogy, which began with The Backside of Nowhere and was followed by Return to Freedom. It tells the stories of families thrown together by happenstance... and by a devastating hurricane. Beginning with: a movie star who goes back home to the (fictional) bayou town of Freedom, Mississippi to be with his dying father. There he runs into an old girlfriend and an old enemy, the local sheriff. Trapped in a house with all of these people during a hurricane he is forced to confront hurts and lost loves that have festered for half a century; a grocery manager, his alcoholic wife and troublesome teenage children; an evangelical preacher with an eye for young girls and college professor who seduces his students; a lesbian couple; an artistic genius with severe social limitations; and another artist who has escaped the art world and now lives as a hermit at a fishing camp. Previous novels: Reunion at the Wetside is a murder mystery. Someone is killing all the drag queens at Barney's Wetside Pub. The Wives of Marty Winters, Imprudent Zeal, and Until the Dawn. Plus a book of art criticism, As If Art Matters.I write theater and art criticism for newspapers in the Tacoma and Olympia, Washington.