In 1988 my mother was very ill and I took a leave from my job and moved back to West Virginia for a few months. I rented this apartment (an old tool shed converted into an apartment) in Glenville, just down the hill from the courthouse. I liked that place! The desk itself is the desk I still use: two filing cabinets with a door laid across. Here on the desk you see a computer, a PC's Limited--the precursor company to Dell--with a 20meg hard drive. (My mother, who was early into computers, said, "Good lord! What will you use 20 megs for?") That's an amber monitor for the computer. On that massive hard drive: WordStar, Lotus, a few games. Also on the desk: two clipboards (I am a big clipboard fan) pens, a desk calendar, two lamps, a matchbook, a check stub, mail, a 5 1/2 inch floppy. On the walls, a map of the Antietam battlefield (I visited Antietam that fall), a map of Gilmer County, and a map of Glenville. Also I can make out a sheet of paper with writing quotes by Vance Bourjaily and Leo Tolstoy:
Bourjaily: "There's a story you could tell to pass the time...."
Tolstoy: "If I were told that I could write a novel in which I could indisputably establish as true my point of view on all social questions, I would not dedicate two hours to such a work; but if I were told that what I wrote would be read twenty years fro, now by those who are children today, and that they would weep and laugh over it and fall in love with the life in it, then I would dedicate all my existence and all my powers to it."
Bourjaily: "There's a story you could tell to pass the time...."
Tolstoy: "If I were told that I could write a novel in which I could indisputably establish as true my point of view on all social questions, I would not dedicate two hours to such a work; but if I were told that what I wrote would be read twenty years fro, now by those who are children today, and that they would weep and laugh over it and fall in love with the life in it, then I would dedicate all my existence and all my powers to it."
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