What follows are the authors’ discussions on the first stirrings, the germination of a poem, or a work of fiction. Any number of headings would be appropriate: Beginnings, The Starting Point, etc. Inspiration would be as good as any.

For years I have enjoyed teaching May Swenson’s subtle poem “Dear Elizabeth,” an intricate meditation on sexuality and exoticism, though I have found my classes startled when I claimed it constituted a kind of causerie between the two lesbian poets about their situation as lesbians, as poets.

These letters written during the period September 20, 1950—May 20, 1952, while James Blake, a night club pianist by profession, was a convict in a southern county jail. The Mr. X to whom a number of the 

Dear Nelson: Well, I left the Academy after a simple but moving graduation ceremony, with a big sawbuck courtesy the State of Florida, and literally hit the road. Impossible to describe the mixed emotions I had walking away from the penitentiary.

The following interviews were excerpted and arranged from those conducted for “James Jones: Reveille to Taps,” a ninety minute television documentary, which was broadcast on PBS in 1983 and 1986.

I saw Lowry only once, that time thirteen years ago, when as an unknown author he arrived in New York as a kind of herald for a novel he had finally finished. Between the man and his art falls the shadow, but if there is an exception, it was Lowry and his Under the Volcano. There was no space between them, no room for a shadow. The identical pressures were in both, the same unrelenting intensity.

ON SATURDAY, AUGUST 27, 2005, the mayor of New Orleans called on the people of his city to evacuate voluntarily ahead of Hurricane Katrina. The governor of Louisiana and the president of the United States had already declared a state of emergency, and by midday on Sunday, the mayor made his evacuation order mandatory. When the storm hit shortly before dawn on Monday, however, many people remained behind, some by choice and some because they had no choice.

I never have any idea where I am. I lived my whole childhood in the purple foothills of the same five-square-mile town and I still couldn’t tell you whether you turn left or right on the single thruway to get to the grade school or the grocery store, or how to find the houses of any of my childhood friends. I can’t tell you how to find the conspicuously modern angles of the apartment building in the small Mississippi town where I lived for three years in graduate school, or even easily direct you from my old house in Austin to the bright little bar where I wrote much of my first book. I never know how far I am from the airport or the highway. I can’t read a map effectively, and even though it’s less than half a mile from my current apartment in London, I couldn’t get to the Thames without the artificial voice on my cell phone—set to an Australian accent so its omnipresence is less tiresome—­calling out turn left every 250 feet. Half the time, to remember which way is left, I have to imagine for an instant that I am picking up a pen.

I met Chekhov in Moscow at the end of 1895. At that time we saw each other only in passing, and I would not even bring up those encounters except to recall several of his characteristic phrases.

“Do you write a great deal?” he once asked me.