We all need role models—writers or not. And all the best role models are dead and all the worst role models are a year ahead of you in school. I found my role model in 4th grade: Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. He could make rough music out of real speech and that became the goal of my life. He was writing in the past, of course. He was a nineteenth-century writer and I was a twentieth-century kid. But he was speaking in the same voice as the old men who hung out at my dad’s filling station—men whose lives had overlapped with Mark Twain’s.

And that’s how it works with a boy—a boy has to find a direct line between life and the page. Boys don’t like to make imaginative deep leaps. They like clear connections, and I found that connection through Mark Twain. I found a writer of the past even then, because we learned only about writers of the past in school. There were no contemporary authors being presented to 5th graders or 7th graders—or 12th graders!  The only living writer we were ever assigned in my childhood was Robert Frost, and he sounded dead. Not that he was deadly, but he was writing in a nineteenth-century tradition. And so I was very much imbued with the writing of the past and it made a contemporary writer out of me. I think we need to know our roots. I think we need to know our history. An awful lot of young people—20-something people—who burn to write never will because they don’t know where the field came from, and the only stories they have to tell are their own.