Influences

• F. Scott Fitzgerald
  Edna Ferber
  Raymond Carver
  Sara Gruen
  Tillie Olson
  Richard Ford

Favorite Books

• Tender is the Night
  A Thousand Acres
  A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
  The Sportswriter
  The Red and the Black
  Madame Bovary

Favorite Authors

• A highlight of my life was the week I spent with Raymond Carver at Centrum.

  While I was working, I regularly attended the Squaw Valley Community of Writers and was fortunate to meet both fiction (Richard Ford; Sandra Scofield; Amy Tan; Louis B. Jones, who's edited both my novels; Mark Childress; and many many others). In poetry I studied, among others, with Brenda Hillman, Lucille Clifton, Galway Kinnell, Sharon Olds, and Robert Hass.

  I volunteer as the Kidney Foundation Luncheon and have helped one-on-one with the book signings for Khaled Hosseini, Amy Tan, Michael Chabon, and Tobias Wolfe; great fun.

  It would be hard to underestimate the influence of F. Scott Fitzgerald in my life and my work. His publishing experience (basically, the better he wrote the poorer he sold) gave me an deep-seated mistrust of 'literary success.' I loved Edna Ferber's Giant--I'd like to do half the job she did with Texas in my own back yard, Silicon Valley.

What I'm Reading

• The 2009 New Yorker Summer Fiction Issue, which doesn't include me although they've had a short story of mine for eleven months, Jane Smiley's Ten Days in the Hills, which sometimes seems like a thousand days in Hollywood, Ford's The Sportswriter, Updike's Rabbit Run. I'm in a powerful writing group--Antoinette May is the leader of our leaderless group--I read their novels almost as my own.