I started writing term papers at the University of Rochester, where I graduated with a BA in History. I liked the feeling of being at a typewriter (yes, we used them in those days) and facing a blank page and trying to figure out how to fill it up. When I was studying English literature at the University of Birmingham during my Junior Year Abroad in England, my tutor read my thesis on author Aldous Huxley (Brave New World) and he said I should get the essay published. I thought then that maybe I could someday get my writing published. During my senior year at the University of Rochester, I took a Southern literature course from visiting professor and author Jesse Hill Ford, who wrote the novel The Liberation of Lord Byron Jones, which was made into a motion picture. Jesse inspired me to become a writer as well, as he read out loud from his own work and from William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, and other Southern writers with his Southern drawl, right there sitting at his desk. It was pure heaven for a budding writer like me to be in his presence, and I recently wrote a short story about a fictional Jesse and taking his class. After I graduated from the University of Rochester in 1975, I went out into the world and wrote articles for various newspapers and magazines, including the Los Angeles Times and Family Weekly. I eventually got a contract to write my first book The Butterfly Garden, which was published in 1985, and after that I just kept writing books. Along the way, I got some short stories published in literary magazines, but my published books were always nonfiction until my novel The Martin Luther King Mitzvah got published in 2018. Now, I just want to continue writing and publishing novels and short stories, although writing a nonfiction book again is not out of the question.