I grew up in a rural Appalachian town of less than 1000 ppl and one of my early writerly projects was, when I was 16, this group of redneck boys let me hang out with them, and we worked on a farm together, and I had promised to write a book about them (tentatively called Hicks).

A weird part of that story is how when I came out of the closet, my mother burnt my books—my whole adolescent library of hundreds of volumes mostly beatniks and romantics—along with all of my manuscripts and notes.

So I lost all of the notes I had taken about palling around with these roughneck guys, working on the farm all day and drinking beer by the campfire every night.

Most of the guys ended up being marines or cops or prison guards, though one of them killed his best friend in a drunken brawl, and a couple OD’d.

The thing to do would be to interview all the guys now—the ones who survived. But I swore to never set foot in that town again.