About the Author

Click here to read an interview with Wayne

Click here to listen an interview in which Wayne reads several passages from the book. A note to dial-up users; this is a 10MB file, better suited to broadband users.

My mother’s first cousin’s husband died mysteriously. My first short story, “The Pact,” transplanted that incident into Cataloochee.

My great-grandfather was killed by a falling tree in Cataloochee. Another short story, “The Burning Tree,” arose from this story.

A family relic, an Iver Johnson “owlhead” pistol, worked its way into the hands of Ezra Banks, who, by then, lived in Cataloochee.

 Photo of Wayne

Thus my typical working pattern: begin by sketching a fragment of a story, or an artifact: a dead man face up in a creek, a huge tree limb atop a farmer, a pistol lying on a table. As details emerge – the wife finds her dead husband, friends turn the limb over, a man orders the pistol from a catalog – I discover why he fell in the creek, how the farmer’s funeral will be conducted, what manner of man bought the pistol. Soon the material begins to stand on its own. When it grows large enough to walk, and not awkwardly, it finds life as a novel.

That’s how Cataloochee came to be.

Appearances




For information about signings and readings please contact Wayne's publicist Maria Braeckel at mbraeckel@randomhouse.com. Wayne can be reached by email at sluder1@mindspring.com