Degree in Creative Writing from Pine Manor College in Boston. For many years he worked in book publishing. Other jobs have included logging, commercial fishing and, briefly, truck driver. He currently divides his time between Ashland, Oregon, and the Four Corners region of the American Southwest. The Never-Open Desert Diner is his first novel.Anderson applied the Page 69 Test to his new novel, Lullaby Road, and reported the following:
I’ve answered this question before, and at first I tended to think of it as a bit foolish. On second thought, the question does make a novelist think hard about how a work as long and intricate as a novel fits together, allowing for shifts in tone and plot and yet somehow also cohesive and representative of the narrative and, in the case of Lullaby Road, the narrator. Lullaby Road is filled with Ben Jones’, a Native American/Jewish trucker in the high desert of Utah, interactions with the eccentrics and self-exiled he serves along a hundred mile stretch of highway. Solitude and privacy are sought and cherished; yet, Ben knows and respects each individual as a human being, though often a very troubled and flawed human being. In these interactions we see how people often dance around each other, the pushme-pullyou of human connections, and how we manage to communicate much more than we intend. This is what is happening on page 69 of Lullaby Road when Ben takes a young, mute Hispanic child and an infant to be cared for by an older, though still beautiful New York socialite who has banished herself to the Utah desert. In that sense, it is representative of the novel.Visit James Anderson's website.
My Book, The Movie: The Never-Open Desert Diner.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
