LARRY BROWN: We're sitting on his pond with a couple of lines in the water, Larry Brown and I. I'm looking across the still, brown water to a small writing house he's been building. We're either early or late for the bite, it's as still as a tomb and so I ask him how it was he came to think he might be a writer. He says he came home from the firehouse one day and wrote a story and that it was awful, but he saw something. He saw that it might be like learning to build a house, if you put in an apprenticeship of an appropriate time, you might one day be a craftsman. "Sometimes," he says, "I'll run into somebody at a party, a doctor, maybe and he'll say, 'A lot of people think I should write some of my stories down,' and he'll tell me one and he'll say, 'What do you think?' I try to be polite, but a good story don't make a writer. Sitting in the chair and throwing stuff away as long and as much as it takes, that's a writer. It would be like me going into that doctor's surgery and pushing him out of the way and operating on some poor bastard because I know what it feels like to be sick." I'm looking at Larry Brown looking at his line. I'm looking at his house there on his pond. It seems so easy, like Willie Mays running under a fly ball. Especially, I reckon, to doctors at parties. Larry Brown was born in Oxford, Mississippi. He joined the Marine Corps in 1970 and served for two years. In 1973, he became a full-time firefighter for the City of Oxford. He began to try to write fiction in 1980 and published his first collection of stories in 1988. He left the fire service in 1990 to write full time. He is the author of two collections of stories, Big Bad Love, and Facing The Music, four novels; Dirty Work, Joe, Father and Son and Faye, and two collections of essays, On Fire, and the just-published Billy Ray's Farm. His work has been awarded many prizes, most recently The Thomas Wolfe Award. He lives with his wife, Mary Annie and their children in Yocona, Mississippi where they raise beef cattle. - AH