I grew up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and although I haven't lived there since I was twenty-seven, it's still the place that has a hold on my imagination. I find Red Stick endlessly fascinating, not only because it formed me by immersing me in its complicated cultural gumbo of everything from racism to seeing the Sex Pistols, but also because it's always struggled to reconcile its identities as the chemical-and-oil city, the home of Louisiana State University, the capital of Louisiana, and a place torn between the pulls of fundamentalism and bacchanal. My two new books focus, in large part, on racism. I hope my books get away from the most-promoted, white, racial narrative, which is that of the educated, white liberal somehow "rescuing" African Americans from "rednecks." Instead, I tried to get to the more complicated narratives, including my own, about the roots and enactments of racism in white people, particularly in working-class people, although I focus on them because that's my background and not because they are more racist than anyone else. I mean, TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD is an inspirational narrative, but having grown up a working-class racist, I feel that book doesn't speak to the issue of white people of all classes needing to take a hard, difficult look at their own ingrained patterns of thought and reaction. More broadly as a writer, though, I want to get at the complexity of particular people's experiences by telling good stories that bring those people alive, and to broaden history in the way that only dramatizing history can. I want people to read my work and enter the lives and places of my characters and to be both entertained and challenged. I hope I do at least a little of that.