1. After writing Under the Tuscan Sun and Bella Tuscany, memoirs about living in Italy, why did you decide to write a novel set in the South?

Since childhood, I have wanted to write about the South. When I was twelve, I started reading Eudora Welty, Thomas Wolfe, Flannery O'Connor, James Agee, and do we dare breathe the name William Faulkner. In the warp and weft of their writing, I found something that corresponded to a feeling I had even then, a sense of that landscape and place that I've kept, even though I've lived my adult life in California, and, more recently, in Tuscany. The southern landscape never can be a backdrop because it's working on you, shaping you.

2. Is Swan a real place?

No, or rather, only in my mind. I was born and grew up in Fitzgerald, way down in south Georgia. It was a mill town and my family ran the cotton mill. My grandfather was mayor many times and my family felt deeply rooted to that spot. The original name of that town was Swan. Although my novel is an act of fiction, I wanted to sound a note of homage to that place. What I love most about places like Swan is the interconnectedness of people. We call it a sense of community now, which sounds a bit remote, and no word is more abused than community. But living in a small Italian hilltown, and having lived in a small town in south Georgia, I understand that you can recognize a family gene pool by the lift of an eyebrow, or the length of a neck, or a way of walking. Swan is partly about an intense place where your neighbor knows what you're going to do even before you do. What is said, what is left to the imagination, what is withheld,-all these things involved me while I was writing Swan. Not so much for the information given or not given, but for the reasons why we tell something or don't. Those reasons are often much more serious than the truth, if it were told. I'm particularly fascinated by secrets kept in order to protect someone from who you are. That protection is the sharpest knife in the drawer.

3. When you were growing up, did you know you wanted to be a writer?

Yes. Thanks to Andrew Carnegie, we had a town library, and I read my way across the shelves. I got the idea that to write books would be the best way to spend a life. I never thought of anything else that seemed like half as much fun, although in my next life I would like to be an architect, too, so I can have an easier time restoring houses.

4. Is it fun to write a novel?

It's a world. I fell into it the way you fall in love-you're half-crazed, half-obsessed. I especially liked my characters, J.J. and Ginger. I wanted to do right by them. Now that I'm through, I miss them-I'd like to invite them over for dinner. I tried to create the way it feels to live in an isolated town in the deep, deep South. To live in a complex family where layers are always being unearthed, and to breathe that southern air on a summer night. There's nothing like that in all the world. When my mother died two years ago, I had the sudden revelation that I never would live in the South. Somehow, I'd always been waiting to go home. When I realized I would not, I wanted to write a novel partly in order to live there in my imagination for awhile, to use all the language I had stored in memory, the expressions, the food and the summer air, and most of all the people and the way they interact. Southerners are hospitable and friendly. They are also the most fatalistic and private people in the world. Swan is set in 1975, not the contemporary South of gutted main streets and Wal-mart, K-Mart shopping centers, and TV-fast-food culture. I wanted to write something that ran along the far edge of that time when someone could still say to you, "Got your daddy's lips; I'd know you anywhere." But Ginger has run off to Italy and J.J., in the end, goes to California for a few days. A kind of coherence is ending.

5. Will you write other novels set in the South?

Right now, I'm working on another book about places, a travel odyssey. I don't know what project will present itself after that. Most of my writing life has been spent writing poetry-six books, plus The Discovery of Poetry, which is a reading guide; then the Italian books, and in the middle, hundreds of book reviews, magazine articles, and essays. Obviously, I'm someone who is always looking for a new form. I enjoy different forms because they use different parts of your brain and imagination and blood. And I'm restless, always on the move. My husband, Edward Mayes, is a poet. Poetry is a large presence in our daily lives. I read three or four novels or nonfiction books a week-that lifelong habit from childhood-and read partly to examine the writing, as well as for pleasure and information. Another novel? Maybe one set in California. As my grandfather said, everything loose rolls west. I like that.