M.A. Harper

"I started out as a young artist fully expecting to become a painter, until one of my art school professors kept trivializing my work as 'illustration'. This was a bad thing? Yeah, apparently. He wanted my work to be about nothing, and I didn't know how to say something about nothing. So I felt really lost until eventually the old concept where one picture equals 1000 words hit me like it was totally new. I'd been trying to make each one of mine equal 1,000,000. That's when you know you're a novelist.

"My father was a farmer. Country life made me and shaped me, and it was always ABOUT something. Southern rural people see everything anecdotally, in terms of beginnings, middles and endings. That's what planting seeds and watching them grow will do for you.

"I've held urban jobs--shoe seller, window dresser, stage manager, law office receptionist, commercial artist--where it's possible to be bored out of your skull unless you can think anecdotally. The arguments you overhear, snippets of real life dramas, you're just a fly on the wall. Nobody is careful what they say to each other in front of a store clerk, and when they leave the building, you wonder will she get into grad school at Emory, or whether his wife's biopsy tomorrow morning will be positive. Rarely, someone's rude and since you're not a chef, you can't spit in his food, so you write nasty little endings in your mind: from the meter maid's left him a ticket, all the way up to he gets hit by a bus. The nice customers, you so much want to see happy endings for the nice ones, but they're not always plausible.

"Then there's your ongoing personal adventure. Me, for instance--I've been assaulted by a criminal, trapped with a rattlesnake, done some skydiving and lived through Katrina. The three men I loved are all dead, two of them from AIDS. A tornado came up my street in the middle of the night in 2006 and scared the bejesus out of me. But it's all raw material.

"New Orleans is where I finally put down roots. I live here with cats. Enjoy partying with old friends, Saints games, going to festivals or just vegging out in my own back yard. It's all good. Even when it's not. This is where my story takes place and where I hope it ends. Only not just yet. I have to keep dodging disasters because I'm still not done with my newest book. Perpetually like Scheherazade.

"My other favorite things? Reading. Family. Palmistry. Wholesale weirdness. Ever since I can remember, I've sensed an Infinite Mystery to life. Life is ABOUT something. Whenever I sit down to write, it's what I'm forever trying to get at. And never can. But the quest can keep a writer alive and very, very fulfilled."