(upbeat music) (projector clicking) - Have you ever wondered where the television signal you're watching is coming from?

♪ I love to go a wanderin' (projector clicking) ♪ along the mountain track - Welcome to True North.

(upbeat music) (mysterious music) - Good evening and welcome to Mainewatch (upbeat music) (projector clicking) Welcome to From the Vault, a celebration of 60 years of Maine Public Television.

On this episode, we revisit a couple of interviews with Maine authors who have new works coming out in the near future.

They are both from the series, "A Good Read with Sandy Phippen".

First up we go to 2004 for a rare sit down interview with Stephen King.

It's quite a candid conversation as he is speaking with his friend and fellow author Sandy Phippen.

And, shocker, Steven has another novel just out titled "Fairy Tale".

There is a longer version of this interview available.

Check out Passport at Maine Public dot org to see the extended version.

Then we had north to the Allagash for a 2001 conversation with Cathy Pelletier, who occasionally writes under the pen name K.C.

McKinnon.

Cathy has a new book out in a few months titled "Northeaster", an Account of the great New England Blizzard of 1952.

She is also putting out some fascinating stories related to that each week on her Facebook page.

Let's start with a visit to the master of horror himself as we go back to 2004 for "A Good Read with Sandy Phippen".. (enlightening music) - I always wrote out of a real articulated feeling that what I wanted to do to the reader was to hurt the reader and to also exhilarate the reader at the same time.

It's not all a negative thing, but I think the book should be approached with caution by the reader, that the book should be something that's really alive and really dangerous in a lot of ways.

Like one of those Uxb's in World War II, be careful and don't reduce fiction to this kind of intellectual gain, because that's not what it's supposed to be about.

(dramatic music) - [Announcer] Production of "A Good Read" on Maine PBS is made possible in part by Bangor Savings Bank and its subsidiaries, Bangor Securities, Bangor Insurance, and Advanced Payroll Plus online at bangor.com.

- Stephen King has been termed the master of modern horror, but the fact remains that King is more than just a literary phenomenon.

He's an international cultural phenomenon, as well as a winner of the National Book Award for Lifetime Achievement.

Hi, I'm Sandy Phippen.

You're host for "A Good Read," and I hope that you enjoy the following interview with Steven King in which King's brilliance and intensity as well as his down to earth Maineness are on display.

Steve, you once said your muse is a guy with a flat top and coveralls.

Who's your muse now?

- Same guy.

- Oh, same guy.

Hasn't changed any?

- No he hasn't changed, same guy.

- Hasn't even aged?

- No, no, I don't think he has, still get to work.

It's time to have fun.

Let's go, let's roll.

- Now you told me some time ago that everything you write is about Maine.

- Well, I don't know if you'd say everything that I write is about Maine.

I grew up here.

This is the place that I know the best.

And I do believe I subscribe to that maxim that you should write what you know.

And I think that if you're writing stuff that's supernatural, stuff that's fantasy, it becomes even more important to write about what you know, to really ground things in reality.

Now there comes a point where you have to say to yourself, maybe I need a change?

Maybe I need to bury my diet a little bit?

And after "Carrie" and "Salem's Lot," my wife and I had a little money by that point.

And I said to her, "I really think we oughta go somewhere else for a while and get a little feel for another part of the country, and I'll write a book."

And she said, "Do you have a book in mind?"

And I said, "no."

And she said, "Do you have a place in mind?"

And I said, "no."

And what we ended up doing was we had the Rand McNally Road Atlas and we opened it to the big map of the United States.

And I closed my eyes and poke, and it came out in Colorado.

And we ended up living there for about a year.

And I think the reason that we didn't stay was because there was such a wide disparity between the young people at the university and the people, they were kind of like white collar workers from IBM.

We didn't feel comfortable.

And some of that is the Maine that you take with you.

It didn't feel the same.

And when I look back on the Colorado books, there's "The Shining, there's the "The Stand."

Those are the two main ones.

I still see in the characters, the sensibility that the kind of Maine working class people that I grew up with.

They're in Colorado, but I really took my Maine with me.

By starting out and saying, your postulate was wrong, I've come around to say probably it's right.

You carry your place with you where you go.

- You also said, I don't believe in Maine literature.

- No, I still don't.

- And because?

- [Stephen] I still don't.

- Could you talk about that a little bit?

It's like it's American literature.

- Well- - All labels are better.

- We talk a little bit about local color.

And if you were to ask me to pick out a number of stories that weren't local color, I could find a couple.

"The Reach" is one that I think of as local color.

There's a short story called "Uncle Auto's Truck," and used to be when we would go through Sweden, Maine to Lovell, there was a truck, this old truck sitting on one side of the road, and I used to call it the black point road memorial tourist truck, because it just looked right there.

It had the mountains in the background, and you could imagine people stopping and taking pictures.

And I asked somebody about it finally at the local diner.

And a guy said, "You know, he's a funny man.

He had a little tiny house right across the road."

And the waitress said, "He says that he has to keep an eye on that truck, because it's creeping up on him all the time."

And I thought, that's wonderful.

I got to write a story about that.

In the end, you say to yourself, really, what am I interested in here?

Am I interested in plot or am I interested in scenery?

And the answer is really, I wanna tell stories, but you try to be as true as you can.

I think you'd agree to this.

If you're writing fiction, you try to be as true as you can in every possible way that you can, and that includes the places that you're writing about.

- Even though you're lying.

- Even though you're lying.

Especially because you're lying.

- It seems to me that Maine people aren't comfortable in too many places.

They always want to get home.

You must have experienced that in Florida, 'cause now you're living in Florida in the winter time.

- Well, Florida frankly is too crowded for me, and there's too many people from away.

I'm from away when I'm down there.

And you get yourself into a funny situation when you go south, when you become a snowbird.

You find yourself all of a sudden in a place where it's crammed with tourists in the winter.

And if you're in Maine, in the summertime, it's crammed with tourists, they're just from different parts of the country.

So instead of finding it's three months of the year, and then the tourists come home, it's six or seven months of the year and you go home, because you are the tourist and you get it.

You see what it's like with the shoe on the other foot.

- Did you move down there after the accident?

Is that why you moved down there or?

- We actually had been in Florida one or two winters before that accident happened.

And I guess maybe everything comes back to Maine somehow, because my wife and I both grew up in Maine.

Tabby is from Old Town and I'm from down in the Southern part of the state, and we raised our family here.

We have three kids.

And our youngest one Owen went to Bangor High school.

And when he was done with that, he went to college in New York and about two years into that experience, we looked at each other one day and said, what the hell are we doing here in the wintertime?

Why are we freezing our butts off in February and shoveling off the driveway and going down the steps, like a couple of old people, which is what we're getting to be.

Oh, watch out, there's a patch of ice here.

Look out for that.

Did you put down the salt and the rest of the stuff?

And we kind of looked at each other and said, we're wealthy.

We're well to do.

Why are we staying here?

And the answer was, just because we always have.

So we picked up and we moved, and after I'd had the accident where the guy hit me, everything ached and burned and it just, to get down there was a real treat to get into the warmth.

And we're like anybody else from Maine, probably Michigan is the same way.

The first thing that I always do in the morning is to turn on the TV and see what they're getting hit with up North.

(Sandy giggles) - When did you first feel that you were successful as a writer?

I mean, was it "The Shining" or when?

- There always comes a moment in a writer's life, magic moment, where you're reading something, and you say, I do better work than this.

And that's a milestone.

In terms of success.

I would say that there was a time and I've written about this, so big pardon to anybody who's heard the story before.

We'd been down to see my mother.

We had two small kids.

I was working at New Franklin Laundry in Bangor and I was sending stories out mostly to men's magazines, because they would buy.

They didn't pay very well, but they paid a hell of a lot better than the $1.65 an hour that I was making at New Franklin.

And we came back from a visit downstate, and my daughter was howling her head off.

She had an ear infection and that meant that we needed amoxicillin.

We just called it the pink stuff, and it was expensive and we didn't have the money for it.

And we got back to our apartment on Grove street in Bangor, and there was a letter in the mailbox from Dugent Publications.

And they had bought a story of mine for $500, which was top dollar then.

And my wife was unloading the car and saying, "What are we gonna do?

How are we gonna get the Amoxicillin, how are we gonna get the pink stuff?"

And I said, "It's no problem, I have a check here for a story, and there's gonna be plenty of money for the stuff."

And there were other things that were much bigger checks that came along later, but that was the best.

- [Sandy] The beginning.

- To be able to say to my wife, we can take care of this, and the reason we can take care of it is 'cause I wrote our way out.

- That's right, you did write your way out.

Did Maine hurt you into writing?

- No Maine didn't hurt me into writing.

Maine was just there.

It was just a fact of my life.

I remember I went to a one room school in Durham, grades one through eight.

I mean, I only went there two years, and then they opened the big four room school down the road by the Grange Hall.

But I remember Miss Heisler, who taught all those grades.

We had a reader.

And the name of the reader was "Roads to Everywhere."

And she said, that's Durham, "Roads to Everywhere."

You got your road to the dump.

You got your road to the school.

You got your road to the parsonage, all the rest of it.

And for me, that's the important part about where you live.

When you know where the roads go, all of 'em, not just, there's a part in this forthcoming "Dark Tower" book that I wrote.

There's an old caretaker, John Cullum, who's a character in there.

And he has to get past these police roadblocks to rejoin his friends.

And this guy Eddie says, do you mean to tell me that you don't know three or four ways out around these city slickers?

And he says, well I might know four or five.

And then he pauses and he says six, and then he pauses again, and he says, actually 11.

And that's the way that it is when you grow up in a place like that.

Maine has hurt me, but did it hurt me into writing?

No.

- I heard yourself tell kids this, that you wrote out of anger, you wrote out hate in fact.

- Mm-hmm, I wrote out of, I don't know about hate exactly.

- [Sandy] It was anger.

- There was a lot of rage in a lot of the work that I wrote.

But I have a feeling about what the purpose of literature is, and I'm still impatient with people who write in a kind of dry intellectual way.

And I've spoken a lot of times in my younger days about John Updike who drove me crazy that way.

And then John Updike's literary son, Jonathan Franzen nowadays.

And my idea about what literature is supposed to be is this kind of a sweaty, close up thing.

I think about, you know, you go to a nightclub or a honky tonk somewhere out in the country, a bottle club.

And it gets to be almost the end of the night, Saturday night, and everybody's drunk and everybody's dancing so close.

And Edward Albee and in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" calls it monkey nipples.

And that's in a way what I think literature is supposed to be, that thing that reaches out and grabs you and just pulls you into this sweaty embrace, and won't let you go.

And it's sexy, but it's angry.

- All the basic emotions.

- All the basic emotions, but I always wrote out of a real articulated feeling that what I wanted to do to the reader was to hurt the reader and to also exhilarate the reader at the same time.

It's not all a negative thing, but I think the book should be approached with caution by the reader.

That the book should be something that's really alive and really dangerous in a lot of ways.

You know, like one of those Uxb's in World War II.

You know, be careful, and don't reduce fiction to this kind of intellectual game, because that's not what it's supposed to be about.

- And I wanna talk about Marguerite Yourcenar now, the immortal who lived in Northeast Harbor.

She said a quote that I thought was great once, when she said that "writers don't create, they arrange."

Do you agree with that?

Do you see yourself as an arranger?

- No, no I don't.

I, I really think that the stories have found articles- - Like you found Uncle Auto's Truck?

- Yeah.

And the story basically will tell itself.

That my job is to get as much of it out unbroken and undamaged.

It's archeological in that sense.

But to arrange things?

- Well, I was- - I can't even arrange character's names.

No, I see myself as more of an archeologist than a set decorator.

- Probably I was being unfair to her.

I just remembered I didn't quote the whole thing.

She said that "everything is already there."

- Yeah, everything is there.

- [Sandy] So you would agree with that?

- I would agree with that completely, yeah.

I do understand that though.

I can think of books that I've written, where you see that design and there's a delight in finding it.

I wrote a short novel called "Apt Pupil," and just began with a concept.

What would happen if a young American boy discovered that a Nazi war criminal was living in his neighborhood?

And taking it from there, the story just simply played out before me.

And I did start to see a real design where I started to see this boy replicate the evil old man.

It was a lot of fun to watch that thing happen.

Say, it's a gruesome story, but it was wonderful fun to write, to watch that design play itself out.

- In your "Writing Book," which I want to talk at length about on writing, which I think is a wonderful book incidentally.

It should be taught in all the schools.

- Thank you.

I was, with the writing book, what I did, when I turned in the manuscript of that, the editor came back to me.

Well, the publisher came back and said, "well, there's some scatological language in here.

There's some barnyard language in here.

What do you think about this?

It's gonna be a problem getting these books, this particular book in the secondary schools, the high schools, not so much in college, if they wanna use it."

And I said, "good."

I like it to be a little bit of an outlaw text if it could be.

Because I think that, kids, you'd know better than I would, you've taught a lot of years, that if you give it to and say, take this book home, put a book jacket on it on, I don't know, Red Riots book jacket, and you're gonna take care of it, and give it back at the end of the year.

Right away, they think that's a dumb book.

But if it's something that they can't, that they have to go and buy themselves, they take it a little more seriously.

- Yes, I think you're right about that.

That's true.

So why the news about you quitting writing?

Quitting publishing?

Quitting publishing, whatever you mean?

- Because I've sent a lot of what I have to say.

I see myself going back and repeating themes and formats, places that I've been before.

The story about the writer who is sort of bitten by his own work and crosses the line into fantasy land.

I think that I've done all the major monsters that I ever really wanted to deal with.

Those, if those were unresolved conflicts from my childhood, they're pretty nicely resolved.

Thank you very much.

And the other thing is, I've been working off and on since I was about 22 on this series of fantasy novels called "The Dark Tower."

And while some of the people who read the books are very irritated, because they've come slowly compared to my other stuff over a course of years, really my mind never leaves Roland in that other world.

And there are a lot of the books that show up in one form or another.

There are characters from a lot of the other books that show up in the gun slinger books.

And I knew way back in 1974, the last time that we see Father Callahan at "Salem's Lot," he's rolling out of town on a Greyhound bus, maybe rolling into Hartford, and he disappears from the book.

And I thought to myself, I have not seen the last of that man.

And working on the "Wolves of the Calla," the fifth of the dark tower books in 2001, sure enough, he showed up right on schedule in this other world and slotted right in where he was supposed to be.

Dinky Earnshaw from "Everything's Eventual" shows up in these books.

A lot of different characters from a lot of stories, so in a way "The Dark Tower" series was the culmination.

It was like putting a bow on top of everything.

And it almost seems to me that after that, where I am actually a character in this book, that it's pretty well, you know that's it, it's all finished.

- Do you see yourself realistiC as a dark man?

- No.

- [Sandy] With a good hat?

- No, no, no.

I think that everybody has a dark man and a dark woman inside.

And one of the things that attracts people to my books or to fiction that's a little bit on the scary side, is that it gives you a chance to explore that in relative safety, that side of your character.

- You said this a long time ago, I maintain that my novel's taken together from an allegory for a nation that feels it's in a crunch and that things are out of control.

Do you still feel that even more so now?

- Mm, I think that it's, all of these things, the scary things, are allegories and ways of trying to deal with very real problems.

And I think that a lot of us do feel that we're out of control in our lives and that we don't have a lot of impact over what we're doing.

So sure, the answer to that is, yes.

- And you also said too, that violence is a way of working things out for a lot of people.

- It is.

It is and a lot of people, for better or for worse.

- It's like the anger in our writing and trying to get it out there.

- The story about the Gordian knot, the guy doesn't even bother trying to untie it, just (Stephen vocalizes).

- I know you've written about the connection between humor and horror.

Could you talk about that a bit?

I mean, I've been reading now for a month, all these critics and stuff about you, that they, it's the humor.

That they don't think it's being serious.

- Oh, they don't get it, man.

I wrote one book that got absolutely trashed critically.

I mean, any book that I've published, you can find 5, 6, 7 reviews that say, this guy is a really terrible writer.

He's a hack, he's a, he's this and that.

- [Sandy] Sophomoric.

- But yeah, sophomoric.

You can find other critics for a lot of those books where they'll say this is a pretty good book.

And my feeling is that always, you balance the two things out, and then you can reject the whole mess.

The only time that you've got a problem is that everybody's saying the same thing.

And I wrote a book called "Needful Things" in 1986.

That was my idea of a comedy.

It was a comedy about the Reagan years.

The idea being that this man came to a small town, opened like a junk shop, and you could buy anything that you wanted, but you ended up paying with your soul.

And I thought that book was hilarious and I got terrible reviews.

If you see it as a comedy, then it's successful.

But apparently once you get a reputation for being that sort of girl, that's it.

- They pigeonhole you and they put you in these categories.

That's right, exactly.

Don't you think it's true?

It's like what Shamus Heaney, the famous Irish poet said that you have to know, to grow up in a place and to write about it well, you have to know about the inner complexities.

And I think that's the problem with a lot of stuff written about Maine.

The people who move here and try to write about it, didn't go to school here like we did in one room school houses, didn't pay their dues that way.

They didn't know.

So they're not aware of the inner complexities.

I like that theme.

- You can write about Maine if you're from away if you write a story about somebody who's from away who comes to Maine.

- Right, right.

- I don't have a problem with that, do you?

- No, not at all.

- No.

- No.

- But if you wanna write from the standpoint of saying here is the story about Maine and Maine people, I think that you have to grow up here, just as you said.

And I do think that there's a big similarity between say the Southern Gothic of Flannery O'Connor and William Faulkner, and what I write, or what you write.

- [Sandy] That's right.

- But there are differences.

There's a difference between the southern sensibility and the northern sensibility.

If only, because up here we don't have that skeleton of segregation and slavery in our closet.

We might have some other ones.

- [Sandy] We have other ones.

- It's different in different places, but I do think that one of the reasons that people come to regional fiction is to understand a little better a place that maybe they've only visited, to see the inner heart in that place - That's right.

Now you weren't surprised, for instance, what I was trying to get at is, and I know you know this, the subterranean unreported Maine, down beneath the lovely little New England towns and so on.

There's this other world that goes unreported.

I mean the arsenic poisonings in New Sweden couldn't have surprised you.

- What a story though, huh?

- Yeah, yeah.

A great story.

- What a story, yeah.

- Incredible, really.

- Probably not for the people who lost the loved ones and stuff, but I understand what you mean.

- Yes, that's right.

That's what I'm referring to.

- That goes back I think, well, you could probably trace it way back to Edward Arlington Robinson and other people.

But it really the person who tore the lid off this small New England town was Grace Metalious.

- Oh yes.

- And there was a real reaction- - [Sandy] "Peyton Place."

- To "Peyton Place" I think, because it was so sexy and so raw.

It wasn't just sex if you go back and read it, there's insanity, incest, all this other stuff.

- Raymond Chandler said, "Writing is an extension of personality."

And that's one thing that I wish you'd commented on more in "The Writing Book."

You did, you touched upon it I think.

I mean, the reason why we can't crank out William Faulkners and Steven Kings is because you have a certain personality.

- Yeah, I didn't touch on that in "The Writing Book," because I didn't think of it.

A lot of times we give big, complicated, educated sounding answers, but the fact is when I wrote the second half of that book, I was recuperating from this accident.

And I'm not trying to lay it off on that, but there were a lot of things.

First of all, the book on writing, I thought it would be a snap, a breeze, a walk in the park, wasn't.

It was hard.

It was surprisingly hard, a lot harder than I thought it was gonna be.

And when I finished it and the book is like this thick, and if you've seen it and the stand, this thick, I thought is this really all you have to say about the art and craft in writing?

And apparently it was, but I do believe that writing is an extension of personality.

And makes me think of Paul McCartney saying to John Lennon at some point after the Beatles became famous, he said, "Wouldn't it be great to start all over again, to go out and play as Morris and the Masked Men?

We could go on stage wearing masks and we could play gigs and small clubs and that sort of thing."

And John Lennon laughed at him and said, "They'd know it was you mate as soon as you played the first chord."

They'd recognize your style of play and they'd recognize your voice.

And I have some experience with that.

I wrote a number of books under the name Richard Bachman, to just to see what would happen.

They were done as paperback originals.

There were three.

And then I did a book called "Thinner" that was done as a hard cover.

And when it got out there, people sampled the style and I started to get letters through the publisher addressed to Richard Bachman saying, "Geez, you write just like Steven King."

And a lot of them were angry at me for that.

Well, you know, "You can't copy him."

- Well, when you say you're done with writing again, are you done with publishing?

- I really can't imagine giving up writing.

- [Sandy] No, I love it.

- I love to write.

It's a blast.

But I can see myself saying, don't publish this, you'll just embarrass yourself.

People say he's eating his own tail.

I don't really want to go there.

- But couldn't you see yourself?

I mean, you've tried everything, which is great I think that's what writers should do, shouldn't they?

I mean, you you've done.

- It keeps it fresh if you try different formats and that sort of thing.

- And aren't there more poems?

I mean, there's something about 50 poems you wrote once.

Would there be an anthology of Stephen King poetry, by chance?

- Oh God, there's probably, there are probably 500, 600 poems that I have in different places.

I love poetry, and I've written a bunch of it, but it's not very good.

- But still, I could see that being a book.

- Eh, I don't think so.

- What about a travel book?

I mean, you've traveled around the world.

- I'm doing a play with John Mellencamp.

- [Sandy] Oh you are?

- It's a musical.

He came to me with an idea that he'd actually called out of a true detective magazines.

He's from Indiana.

And he found a crime, what we would call a crime passionnel from the '40s where two brothers had had a falling out over a girl and one of them had been killed.

And I don't wanna go into details, because that's the story.

And he said, "I would love to write the music for this, if you wanted to try the book."

And I said, "Yes okay, let's try that."

And I haven't gotten around to it yet, but I've written like a 67 page treatment.

I'm ready to sit down and do it.

Other things intervene.

But the reason I said yes was, because the subject matter buzzed me.

It turned my dials.

But also because it was something that I hadn't tried before.

And if you are only gonna get to go to the dance once, you oughta do more than just the box step Waltz.

You oughta try some of these other things, so that's what I'm doing.

- A number of years ago, you told me that you were writing a script for Steven Spielberg.

Whatever happened to that?

- You never forget anything.

- [Sandy] No, I don't.

- Sandy Phippen never forgets anything.

- [Sandy] Along with the police.

(both laughing) - Yeah, Sandy knows everything, just like the police.

(Sandy laughing) Steven Spielberg and I have tried to work together I think three times.

There's "The Talisman," there was "Poltergeist," and there was some kind of an original deal.

I don't remember what that was, but it's always been a case of two strong creative personalities.

And Steven Spielberg is an extremely intelligent man.

And he is just fiercely creative.

Wherever you go with Steven, unless you're very, very quick, Steven is two steps ahead of you.

He's like, he's like Michael Jordan to the basket almost.

I don't wanna say Michael Jordan.

I wanna say Scotty Pippin I think, somebody who's little and quick, and they've always got you boxed out, sucker.

And I'm not that fast, but I've been writing for 30 years and I've gotten used to having my own way.

And we have a plaque in our garage that says, if you're not the lead dog, the view never changes.

And I think that's basically the problem.

It was always a question about who was gonna be the lead dog?

So, we haven't made it work yet, but maybe we will.

Maybe the time will come.

- Did you have anything to do with that, the play on Broadway of "Carrie?"

There was a musical, "Carrie."

- No, no.

- You didn't do that?

- The only thing that I had to do with that was saying yes, saying okay, that I'm willing to let you do that.

And again, it's the same thing.

It's curiosity.

I have a thing that I call the dollar deal.

My accountant will roll his eyes and probably pull his hair out because I mentioned it.

But basically, people write me letters and say, can I make a student film out of X, Y, or Z?

And generally speaking, if nobody has the film rights to X, Y, and Z, I just had a kid come to me before we started this interview.

A letter that my assistant gave me saying he wanted to make a student film out of "Secret Window, Secret Garden," and they're now filming that.

And so for legal reasons, I have to tell this kid, no.

But if they're not under contract with somebody, I will say to them, "Yeah, you can make a film out of it.

You can make your student film, but you can't do it for profit.

You gotta pay me a buck, and you've gotta send me a copy of the finished film on a DVD or a videotape."

- Fair enough, looks like.

- Yeah, yeah it is.

But the entertainment value is great, because some of 'em are just freaking hilarious.

- Uh-huh, uh-huh, of course, of course, yeah.

- I did a story called "The Sun Dog" one time, and it's a pretty scary story, and this kid did it as a Gumby deal, and I just fell on the floor.

It was a wonderful.

Go ahead, I'm sorry.

- Your band, the Rock Bottom Remainders.

And maybe we have to explain remainder to the audience, the remainders are books that are are not selling.

Do you still do it?

What happened to the band?

- The band played a tour on the West Coast in the spring, and I wasn't able to do it, because of writing commitments, a TV series called "Kingdom Hospital."

And so there's still going on, are they?

- Yeah, they play, they play.

- They're still going on.

- Somebody said a funny thing though.

He said, "Really the Remainders without Steven King is like the Grateful Dead without Jerry Garcia," which I thought was really sweet.

- [Sandy] That is.

That's a great compliment.

- I never played the guitar like Jerry Garcia or sang like anybody in particular, but it's a lot of fun to go out and do something that's more of a hobby than work.

Because, what we do, is a funny thing.

Writing is almost like a hobby, even when you do it professionally, 'cause you only do it for a short period of time every day.

I guess some people do it all day long.

I don't know how they do it.

I work about four hours a day and you don't really know what you're up to until it's done.

And if you're very, very lucky, somebody pays you money for it.

- What about rock music, man?

We gotta go to that, because you write to rock music.

- Sure, yeah.

- And you still do.

Has it changed?

I mean, what are you writing to now?

Are you?

Metallica, you mentioned at one point.

- Well, I don't think it's changed that much.

It's changed in one way.

I got this wonderful gadget.

That's called an XM radio.

It's a satellite radio.

There are no commercials.

It just pulls it down from the satellite and channel 12 is Cross Country.

It's a kind of cross between rock and roll music and country music.

And I just love it and I just crank it up.

And a lot of times I write to that, but you get older and you get peanut butter in your gears.

They get a little bit sticky.

And nowadays I used to just crank the music and I'd write first draft and it never bothered me.

That's the part where you're snatching it right out of the air and putting it on the page.

Rewrite is a different thing entirely, as you well know.

- [Sandy] Yes.

- And with me, I- - Do you switch to classical music?

- No, no I don't.

I still listen to rock and roll, but generally when I'm writing first draft, I don't listen to anything at all anymore.

I driven my wife crazy.

I wrote this, the last three volumes of "The Dark Tower and they're about 2,500 pages total.

So a manuscript that's like this.

And I discovered this dance mix, Lou Bega, "Mambo No.

5," and I played it over and over and over again.

And one day, when we were at our house by the lake, it was between tracks and I was upstairs and there's an open space that goes down to the great room below.

And I heard my wife saying to the housekeeper, he just plays that to spite me.

(Sandy laughing) - What about classical music though?

You weren't turned on with that when you were a kid.

- Never listen to it.

I'm doing a column now for "Entertainment Weekly" once a month.

And I said on general principles, no pop music can come into my house with an artist that only has one name.

There's that woman Beyonce.

And I thought, well, alright, she's not allowed in my house.

And then I found out she's actually Beyonce Knowles, so that's okay.

- And Cher is okay?

- Well Cher is not really okay, actually.

No I'm afraid not.

My idea is rock and roll, the louder the better.

- Okay, but what about today though with hip hop and rap music.

- I like Eminem.

I understand Eminem.

I think that he's funny.

I think that he's clever.

I think that he's really angry, and in a lot of ways I recognize a kindred spirit.

Here is somebody who really wants to use his art form to hurt people.

And if only, I mean, you say it that way and it sounds so negative, but it's like, hey, wake up, there's a whole other world, Bunky.

Get your freak on.

Here it is.

(Sandy laughing) - When you're writing, a real writer, you go over the line, lines like that, when you know how it's gonna work out, when you finally, that that's exciting, that's why it's joyful.

- Yeah, it is.

There's a lot of exciting things about the job.

It's still the best part of my day.

I work from maybe eight until noon, and I get up, and I'm as excited about it as I used to be.

I made friends with Evan Hunter who writes under the name, Ed McBain last year.

He's also a boy from the Northeast who kind of fled down to Florida and he's down there winters.

And he's in his mid 80s now.

And I said, and he's written, people call me prolific.

This guy's written maybe 150 novels, and they're good.

They're not like John Creasy who wrote 400, but they're not very good books.

And I said to Evan, "Do you still like it?"

And he said, "I love it."

So that's something that doesn't wear out.

The Amish have a thing that they say, kissing don't last, cooking do.

(Sandy laughing) And it's to some extent, it's true that writing lasts too.

- One of the reasons Stephen King's writings will last is because he understands small towns.

He grew up poor in Maine and has a good sense of community that is innate.

Many big city critics don't seem to understand or fully appreciate this and how the fragile balance of life in a small town can be easily upset by any kind of intrusion from away.

King, a gifted writer with a good heart, does understand deeply.

And it's this sense of community that runs through all his work.

For "A Good Read," I'm Sandy Phippen.

- Can you see this on your camera?

- [Cameraman] Yes, yes you can.

- "Moth magazine."

This goes back to, sold this in Pat's Pizza with George McLeod.

- When you were a kid, the "Moth Magazine" at the University of Maine.

- [Stephen] Yeah.

- With your poems, your three poems.

You had "The Dark Man" was the first poem.

- Here it is, "The Dark Man."

I have stridden the fuming way of sun-hammered tracks and smashed cinders.

I have ridden rails and burned sterno in the gantry silence of hobo jungles.

I am a dark man.

I have ridden rails and past the smuggery of desperate houses with counterfeit chimneys and heard from the outside, the inside clink of cocktail ice while closed doors broke the world, and over it all a savage sickle moon that bummed my eyes with bones of light.

And it ends by saying, an a sign to those who creep in fixed ways, I am a dark man.

(gentle upbeat music) - What are you doing?

Yeah, I'm a writer, I don't wait for the muse to descend.

I mean- - Yes- - I don't even know the muse.

And so I said, you know what?

If I waited for a muse to descend, my electricity would be cut off.

Thomas Wolf says, "You Can't Go Home Again".

He meant that thought for the traveler, but it applies to those of us who barely leave the houses where we were born and raised.

For the past is lost to us forever.

(gentle upbeat music) - Hi, I'm Sandy Phippen.

Your host of A Good Read.

Cathie Pelletier hasn't lived in Maine for 25 years, but she still can't help writing about us.

She also put a fictitious place called Malagash on the map, surrounded by storytellers while growing up in Allagash on the St. John River, Cathie knew she was a writer when she was still a young grade school student.

She's been a prolific writer ever since, and now writes under two names, her own and the pen name of K.C.

McKinnon.

And after she skipped two grades, the sixth grade and her senior year in high school, writing came in handy.

- I had already started writing.

I had already started writing.

I even remember the first time I decided I have to put this on paper.

It was snowing, and I was standing by the register at school and it was clanking away and the mittens were drying and it started to snow.

And I remember just being overwhelmed with this feeling, this sensation, it's like a baptism, I think when I hear people talking about baptism of this coming into your body.

- Or epiphany or something.

- An epiphany, yeah.

I wrote a poem about the snow coming down, and shortly thereafter Kennedy was assassinated and I took to pen full time then, because I thought someone has got to write about this woman crawling on the back of the trunk.

She was my hero.

And John saluting and so I kept books.

My father at that time started working for Fraser Papers company and they gave him a huge roll of paper.

It was about this high, it was like a monster, this big white snowball of paper.

And I would unroll it as we all did, as we needed it, and we cut our own paper.

- Uh-huh.

- So I made my books out of those and I recorded the whole Kennedy Saga.

- Are those still exist, those little books?

- No.

- Ah, too bad.

- Oh, I wish they did.

So the seeds were there and when I jumped that grade, it was an abrupt thing in my childhood.

Nobody knew back then how to talk to a child about readjusting to another grade.

I went from baseball in recess and no homework to a class where girls were wearing bras and straight skirts and putting on makeup and doing homework.

- [Sandy] And doing homework.

- And it was a very traumatic jump.

And there was some ladies in town not happy about it.

Hi, ladies.

(Sandy chuckles) And so, I think that, you know how we've heard so many times that writers have to have a sense of isolation?

You can have all kinds of variables there, but one thing that seems constant is a sense of isolation.

And it can be in a crowded family, it can be, but you have a sense.

And I think that's where mine fully developed, when I suddenly felt cut apart.

- Didn't you feel different though, even earlier, maybe?

A little bit different.

- Well, I... - Being the baby in the family, no?

- I think so, but not really.

- Mm-hmm, okay.

- Not really.

I mean, I knew that I wanted to write, but I don't know if I would've followed through with it.

- Let's piece this together.

You went to school right here in Allagash?

- Yeah, I did.

- Gammar school, first of all?

- Grammar school, and I went three years of high school, and then I skipped my last year of high school as well.

I went to Orono to summer school and a couple of the professors there said, maybe you shouldn't go back to high school.

Maybe you should go on to college.

And nobody was doing that back then.

And so they had to write letters of recommendation and I had to be approved.

And they decided that that was... Really, by that time I was ready to skip.

(Cathie chuckles) The dye had been cast.

- So you were very young when you went to college then?

- I was 16.

- At college.

It started at Fort Camp.

- Yeah, yeah.

- I expelled when I just turned 17.

(both chuckles) I didn't rest on my laurels long.

Yes, I was given their distinguished alumni award in 1991.

And it became an AP story.

The idea that I'd been expelled and then was given the distinguished alumni award.

- Let's go back to your radicalism again 'cause was this because you were protesting?

You know, civil rights was on Vietnam.

- Doesn't it sound like it's Angela Davis?

- [Sandy] Yeah.

- Abby Hoffman stuff?

No, I wasn't good at following rules in the dormitory.

- Okay, all right.

Oh, yes, that was a big one then.

- That was a big one then.

And of course, we had curfews, 11 o'clock.

- Mm-hmm, and males and females were very separated?

- Yeah, and a group of girls decided to pull a fire alarm one night and my being the youngest and wanting to be the wanting attention.

My hand was the one that pulled the fire alarm.

That got me completely out of the dorm, that one.

And then, there was a little bit of campus unrest when they wanted to close Fort Kent down to a- - Oh, yes, that's right.

- I can't even remember.

It was a two year program they wanted to- - Something like that.

- Something like that.

And we went and met with the chancellor above the president's authority in Fort... That was quite radical, I think.

- Yeah, that was.

- That's very radical.

- That was.

Well, let's jump ahead now.

So after you graduated from college, how did you get to Nashville?

I guess that's what I'm leading up to how did you leave Maine?

- Oh my, let's see.

After I was expelled for radicalism, which was pretty darn easy in 1970, I lit out across country hitchhiking.

I hitchhiked through 43 states before I came home.

My poor father, when he sees this.

I called and said, "could you wire me some money?"

And he said, "where are you?"

And I said, "Poplar Bluff".

And he said, "where is that?"

And I said, "Missouri".

Going through Tennessee, I fell in love with the visual rolling hills.

And so, I always knew that I was going to go back one day.

And I did, I went to learn to write country songs and to go to graduate school at Vanderbilt.

And I lasted a short time at Vanderbilt.

I took Anglo-saxon, which was the most stupid thing I've ever done in my life, but- - We didn't talk about music ethic.

You know 'cause that's the music city.

Did you listen to country in Western music when you were a kid here growing up?

- Well, it might have been called country in Western then.

Of course, it's country and has been since, no it wasn't 'cause in 1948 it officially became known as just country.

- Right.

- But... - So when you go to Nashville, you don't say country in Western, you're there to pitch a country in Western song.

You'll be showing the living sign.

My father played guitar and harmonica and fiddle.

And so, we'd wake up Sunday mornings hearing him singing.

And so, that again, that's a part of the storytelling tradition.

Those old country songs, very, very strong storytelling songs.

So that was, you know, I had started writing folk songs, I guess before that.. And traveling, I moved to Canada and that helped me so much with my writing.

I think, now of having read letter where Ezra Pound said, "without music, the poetry withers and dies".

And I think that my attempts of writing songs and I... Yeah, I've had a couple cut David Byrne of the Talking Heads, cut one.

I think that just made me listen a little more to the words and the internal rhymes and the subtlety of words.

♪ Who are you thinking of when we're making love last night ♪ ♪ Was it a good-looking stranger, or a close friend of mine ♪ - You still write songs?

- I do, I dabble, I'm not, you know, I have friends who are professional songwriters and so I don't want to diminish what they do.

What they do is very difficult job.

But I still am interested in ideas that I know don't belong in pros and, so- - And plus you're in Nashville, - I'm in Nashville and I have a lot of friends who are songwriters.

So I keep thinking that one day I'm going to go back and really study the art of songwriting, which I've not really done.

I've written a couple hundred songs, but I'm not as crafted as those guys.

I mean, they can craft a song and academics can say what they like about it.

I'd much rather reach a whole lot of people than a few academics.

And they're very good at what they do.

I mean, they're bad songs.

There's bad opera, there are, you know, bad anything.

Achy breaky heart?

(both chuckles) - [Sandy] Yes.

- But that's not the only music I listened to, but- - So how'd you meet Jim Glaser?

- [Cathie] Oh, Glaser.

- [Sandy] Glazer.

- Glaser.

When I hitchhiked, I spent three months in Portland, Oregon or month in Portland, Oregon before I came back and I used to go to this place across the street from a piano bar, and never thought anything more of that.

And when I got back to Fort Kent, the woman who used to play piano at that piano bar in Portland, Oregon moved to Fort Kent to teach music.

Isn't that amazing?

- That is amazing.

- After we became friends and got to talking, that's how we realized.

And she had grown up on the farm next to the Glaser brothers and you know, Tompall was one of the Outlaws with Waylon and Willie.

♪ Where does it go ♪ The good Lord only knows ♪ Seems like it was just the other day ♪ - And Jim Glaser had written Woman, Woman by Gary Puckett and all this and had his own hits.

And the Glasers had, they had won so many awards as a group before Alabama and Oak Ridge Boys that Billboard gave them an award for winning the most awards.

(laughing) - Oh, that's great.

- That was another award.

Well, so, Award Glaser- - Yes.

- that's great.

- Yeah, and the Glasers had published "Gentle On My Mind".

They had one of the hottest studios in Nashville.

What an experience for a young writer, because I suddenly started flying around the world with drivers taking us everywhere.

It was amazing.

You can't have an education like that.

- No.

- To be called and say, you want to go to Vienna?

Somebody's canceled, we're going in, you know, tomorrow.

Can you be packed?

Or we're going to the United Kingdom for five weeks with the driver, I mean, that happened- - Yes.

- Often, so - So you met him and you stayed there.

- 16 And a half years.

- Mm-hmm.

- Well, we separated two or three times.

I used to call us the Zelda and F Scott of music city.

(Sandy chuckles) - You have a reputation for being wild there with Jim?

- Well, we were both very stubborn, very, very forceful personalities.

And that's probably why we stayed together 16 and a half years trying to break the other spirit, right?

And then we really did separate and we've remained very close friends.

Jim came up here in May to sing at my mother's funeral because she asked him to sing two hymns.

And so, he took his guitar and got on a plane in Nashville and came up and sang the two hymns and went back the next day.

- Oh, that's wonderful, Cathie.

That's a great star.

- Yeah.

- He's a close friend of everyone in the family.

- How come you never married though, you two?.

- I never wanted to get married.

There were a couple of times when I thought about it, 'cause it's when somebody gets to be, you know, Jim was 15 years older than I.

After a while, when you keep saying my boyfriend and he is like, you know, 55.

(both chuckles) It sounds like your parents are waiting for you to come home from a date.

There were a couple of times we thought, well, maybe we ought to get married and it just didn't happen.

And I never really wanted to get married.

I just didn't want to do it.

Didn't want to put my name on a piece of paper.

And ended up turning 40 and getting married very quickly.

- Uh-huh, yes you did.

- Yeah.

- Tell us about Tom, we forgot about Tom.

I know you tell- - Who was Tom?

(both laughing) - Your husband whose last name I can't pronounce.

- My husband.

- His last name is Viorikic in English, but his father would say, Viorikic.

My husband, he's a Yugoslavian, born when there was a Yugoslavia.

He's actually born in Croatia.

His father is Serbian, his mother Croatian.

And then went to Italy and lived for a while, and then came to Canada.

- Toronto, that's what you- - Yep.

- He's Canadian citizen since 72, I think.

And so he's...

The whole family speaks several languages and they traveled everywhere, so they're very interesting bunch.

- The first book was "The Funeral Makers".

The book that brought you national attention.

- Yeah.

- How'd that come about, Cathie, "Funeral Makers", what happened?

- Well, when I was about 16, I wrote a short story called "Funeral Makers", and it stayed in my mind, the title.

And when I moved to Tennessee, I didn't live in Nashville at first, I lived in Lebanon.

- [Sandy] Uh-huh.

- And I became friendly with a family of undertakers who owned a recording studio.

(both laughing) There wasn't one of them playing with a full deck in the entire family.

And, you know, southerners can be very eccentric in the most delightful way.

And trust me, these people were eccentric.

I mean... And so, I used to hang out at the funeral parlor and the embalming room and all through there.

And that gave me the idea for a family of...

I thought, oh, gosh, what about that story?

So it has nothing to do with them.

The only thing that I ever used that the head undertaker told me was that his mentor taught him a very grave lesson about undertaking.

He said, "son, you never bring him in at the toe, because that way all they see of their loved one is two nostrils.

Bring him in at the head".

(both chuckles) So I thought, I might have to write a book, so I can use that.

- Mm-hmm.

I mean, I heard Spike Lee say something.

I never thought I'd ever remember something Spike Lee says.

He seems like very angry man, but he said about the filmmakers who like to brag, that they didn't know anything about filmmaking when they made their first film.

That that will probably work for a while, but eventually it's not going to work anymore.

- [Sandy] Right.

- You need to start studying your craft.

And I think that's true of writing.

I didn't know much at all about writing.

I would've rewritten "The Funeral Makers" 10 more times.

The way I write now, I'm very conscientious about draft.

By the time a draft is ready to go out, I've rewritten it maybe 10 times or more.

- [Sandy] Right.

- It's hard to tell, I rewrite a lot.

But now, then I went back and said, you know what?

I want to learn more about writing.

I've written two or three books, kind of by the seat of my pants.

I want to learn more, and so I started reading more.

- This was after the trilogy?

When you call it the trilogy, the first three books.

- Yeah, well, you know, Updyke, I think it was said we never write four books because no one knows what to call it.

(chuckles) I think it's a tetrology, isn't it?

- Yeah, something like that.

- Yeah.

It was around that time, but by the time I got to "The Weight of Winter", it was actually my fourth book.

- Mm-hmm.

- [Cathie] And I spent a lot of time on "The Weight Of Winter".

- Right, yes, you did.

- It came out as my third book, it was actually my fourth.

- Yeah, it's your third novel.

- It was published third, but it was the fourth book.

I wrote "Bubble Reputation" before that.

- Oh, you did.

- I did.

I wrote it this my second novel, and it was 800 or the most self-indulgent pages you will ever ever see in your life.

I thought, well, "The Funeral Makers" was front page in New York Times book review, People Magazine did a story on me.

I was going everywhere in the country.

I, New Yorker, I mean, I thought, boy, this is- - [Sandy] I'm there.

- I just do this every time I write a book.

- Yeah.

- It's what I was thinking.

- Yeah, you thought it was easy- - Yeah, and I thought, you know, my laundry list must be interesting to these people, I'll just whip something up and send it out.

And if a cat went by and touched my leg, it was like Virginia Woolf, I typed it in.

I spent a long time talking about why cats do the figure eight and the cattle glands and why they're marking, and their scent, and anything and everything I knew I put in the 800 pages, which is sad.

Some people know more than that.

And my agent read it and said, "if anyone does publish this, the critics will kill you".

And I had to put it on the shelf and write another book, and that was very, very difficult.

I think that's where most writers, many writers who do one book, fall by the wayside.

It's the second book syndrome.

- Mm-hmm, that's right.

- So I'm glad that I hung in there.

And when I wrote "Weight Of Winter", I went back and took "Bubble Reputation" out, and I cut 400 pages out of it.

- [Sandy] Uh-huh.

- So that's what I try to tell students when I would, you know, remind them, you might be in love with your writing, but trust me, you've got to learn to edit yourself.

"As Larry Monahan scooped by with the town plow, snow was beating against the windows of the McKinnon homestead, inspiraling down beneath the yard light.

He didn't hear the coyotes as they rattled off a few yells from the back field, edging the woods.

And he didn't hear the steady, calm breathing coming from the bedrooms of the old homestead.

His mind was on other things.

As he listened to the scraping blade of the plow.

It looked to him like he was going to have one hell of a busy winter.

As he rounded the most treacherous bend in the Malagash Road the lights of the plow swept across the yard of the McKinnon house.

Proud old house clinging for deer life to the banks of a proud old river.

In the swirl of white snow, only the shutters stood out.

Black eyes opened to the blustery night.

Larry Monahan didn't know, that just moments before, a light had been burning in one of the upstairs windows.

The heart of the house, glowing.

Then the old homestead disappeared into the raging blackness behind him.

- [Sandy] Did you plan on being away from Maine for 30 years?

- [Cathie] No, isn't it funny?

- [Sandy] Yeah.

- [Cathie] Where did 30 years go?

How does that, I still feel 18.

- [Sandy] Right.

- [Cathie] How did that happen?

- [Sandy] It goes fast.

- Yeah, it does.

But, you know, other people, I think, you know how in small towns, especially rural areas, you're always told, oh, you gotta go out to the city and make something of yourself.

You you've got to go out and do something with your life.

Well, why can't people stay on their soil of their ancestors and live their lives right there and be, as long as they do not ever feel trapped.

- [Sandy] Right, that's right.

- That's the only difference.

- Right.

- Then never leave home, stay.

- Well, I think the ones don't you... As a quick answer, the people who find love, find their life's mate early on, they seem to be pretty happy.

People like that, raising their families- - You could be miserable and trapped.

(both chuckles) - Yes, you could, but I'm trying to think if they have a good job.

- I'm not gonna go this far, Sandy.

I know too many unhappy people.

- All right, let's go to your new books 'cause you've changed your way of writing.

You've started calling yourself, K.C.

McKinnon.

- You have- - Well, I did for those books.

- Why did you do that?

- You know, my husband and I were in a book store on the Waterfront in Toronto, near where we lived and I was complaining about the best sellers.

And moving writer, novelist friends up into the racks with the best sellers.

This is what I do at airports.

I put my writer friends in Oprah's book club thing.

- Right.

- Little boost, and Oprah can't read everybody, is my feeling, and I'm like an unpaid assistant by putting some books in there that I think she'd like.

And he said to me, why are you always complaining?

You know, for two years I've heard you and your writer friends complaining about these more commercial books that are... Why don't you do it yourself, why?

And I thought what a great question.

- [Sandy] Uh-huh.

- There was almost a sense of snobbiness in the idea, that, you know...

If you write something very accessible, it's not supposed to be good literature or something.

- [Sandy] Right.

- I quit buying into that notion a long time ago.

So I thought he's right, I'm gonna try it.

And I did and first one's in 18 languages.

- Right, that was the "Dancing at the Harvest Moon".

- [Cathie] Yep.

- And then you followed it with "Candles On Bay Street".

- [Cathie] Yep.

- Which I just finished reading, which is about Fort Kent.

- It is.

- And I want to talk about that if we can a little bit.

And you've got another one coming out soon.

Although K.C.

McKinnon book, the one about Nashville.

- Yeah, that one is still...

It's just finished, so it's going out to be sold.

- Is that Camilla?

- "Visiting Camilla".

- "Visiting Camilla", that's what it's called.

- But it won't be, a year and a half, so watch I'll start getting emails about where was the Camilla book.

- Right, but you also have a Cathie Pelletier book coming up.

- I just finished it.

- And that's called what, what's that called?

- "Running The Bulls".

- Oh, yes, I did know that, that's right.

And that is set where?

- It's set in Maine, but it's- - Not Malagash.

- No, and the geography is not important at all.

- Okay, all right.

- To the characters, which the Malagash books are.

- What's the genesis of one of your books.

You get an idea, what happens...

It's like with that book, what caused you to write it?

- Well, I wanted to write another McKinnon book since the first one was selling so well.

- [Sandy] Uh-huh.

- And I mean, it was just like a fire.

It was amazing.

- [Sandy] Uh-huh.

- And what are you doing?

Yeah, I'm a writer, I don't wait for the muse to descend.

I mean- - Yes- - I don't even know the muse.

- You know what's gonna happen now?

- Yeah, I mean, that's part of your job.

So sometimes I have a bit of an idea.

Usually, if I'm six chapters in or so, then I start making notes on the end.

"Beaming Sonny Home", I wrote the ending, and thought, oh, God, I'm gonna have to write a novel up to this end.

- To go with the ending.

- Yeah, 'cause I really wanted to write a short story.

So they're all different.

But, you know, it's funny when you go to talk to different students.

I had a professor once say, tell them about the muse descending and how this is part... And I was stunned.

(Sandy chuckles) You know, and not only that, students nowadays, they want the muse to bungee jump.

- [Sandy] Oh, yes.

- I mean, the descending is not- - [Sandy] It takes too long.

- Yeah, and so I said, you know what, if I waited for a muse to descend, my electricity would be cut off.

So that's the job of writing.

- You said you were a hermit now and you- - I am.

- What do you mean by being a hermit?

- I'm obsessed with my writing and I spend anywhere from 8 to 16 hours a day at my computer to the point where my legs were hurting so much and swelling and my friend, Rose Kingsland who's a writer in London, England.

We emailed back and forth.

We have our legs propped up and we're both like these two hideously, deformed crones who are still typing.

And so, as a result, you know, I used to hate writing.

I still hate writing.

I hate it with a passion.

I like that I have written something, when it's done.

- [Sandy] Uh-huh.

- I feel I've accomplished something, but it's still just an awful job.

- [Sandy] I know what you mean You have to write though.

- Well, what am I gonna do now?

- Well, I mean you have to something creative.

- Take comic.

(chuckles) I don't know that that's true, you know.

I guess, it's true.

I think I could spend most of my life looking at the clouds and sipping red wine.

I think that's creative, but how else I make a living, and I do make a living as a writer and have for quite a while.

- And you enjoy the career and you're enjoying your career.

- Well, I suppose.

(chuckles) - You have now your own publishing company?

- I started the small press.

- But yet, you made a million dollars on the paperback of K.C.

McKinnon, the first K.C.

McKinnon book.

- I don't know how much money the first one made.

It made a lot of money.

I was paid a million dollar advance for the second one, "Candles On Bay Street".

- Oh, the second one, okay.

- And for an 80 page synopsis.

- Okay, and you're now into film work.

- I am, I'm... Now, that is what I'm really enjoying writing.

- Mm-hmm.

- It's hard work.

Again, those hours that I have to make myself.

You asked in my hermit, I was telling you earlier that one... Last year, I didn't leave my house for three months.

And then I had to go to the airport and then I didn't leave again for two months.

I go to the back patio with the dogs.

I have a little bar at home, and so, friends come about every two weeks.

A few friends will come, and so I see people.

But I really don't get out of my old ready pajamas and a ponytail.

And I really am quite... And when you do go out in an automobile, you go, whoa, whoa, it's amazing.

- [Sandy] You're moving.

- It's amazing, and then you go into a supermarket and you go, God, look at the colors, look at the things.

You know, so it's discovering things anew.

- Mm-hmm.

Now, didn't you Cathie, tell me before, weren't you working with Hollywood?

Didn't Hollywood pick up some of your early books to make into films?

- Yeah, well one of them has already been filmed.

The first K.C.

McKinnon book.

- Okay.

- Columbia TriStar bought.

The CBS is going to run it later this year, starring Jacqueline Bisset and Valerie Harper is the two main characters.

I just optioned the second McKinnon book last week to a young progressive producer in Los Angeles.

Who's loved it since the manuscript.

And then I'm writing, I'm working with a few directors and small independent things that I've written.

That's fun.

- Mm-hmm.

I'm just going with a new film agent to see about selling a bigger budget.

Things that I'm writing.

And I've written seven Pelletier novels, three McKinnon novels, two of the books based in country music.

I think, it's time to try something new.

- That's right, thank you.

- My pleasure.

"From our spot there on the Hilltop, we could see all of Fort Kent unrolled before us like a thick, warm rug, smoke rising from fireplace chimneys, yellow lights blinking on as though there were stars being born, little supernovas.

Thomas Wolfe says, you can't go home again.

He meant that thought for the traveler, for the seeker who goes off into the world and then comes back to find that the place he left is irrevocably changed, but it applies to those of us who barely leave the houses where we were born and raised.

It applies to all of us.

For the past is lost to us forever.

What would you like to say Cathie to Maine people?

- Maine people.

- Yes.

- That what would Maine people like to hear from me, probably nothing.

I've never gone anywhere in the world and had someone say to me, where are you from that I haven't said Maine.

I live in Nashville.

And I think that's what comes from having roots that go so deep.

- Right.

- Eight generations back, five generations back and on the same area.

And you can't buy that.

- No.

- You can't buy that.

And I think there are people... You know, you pay a price for that as well.

There's a negative side to that, but I wouldn't give it up.