Five-year-old Allen Wier wearing his six-gun on the book's cover.

Allen Wier (a Scots name, not German, it's pronounced Wire) spent the first five years of his life with one foot in Mexico and the other in Texas. From 1946, when he was born, to 1951, he and his mother, George Ann, followed his father, Ralph, back and forth across the border, their visits measured by the length of their tourist visas. When the visiting period, usually about three months, expired, mother and son had to return to San Antonio briefly before they could re-enter Mexico, and then the cycle would begin again.

Ralph Wier was in the wholesale flower business in Mexico--in those days a wilder and woolier place. What Allen Wier saw, heard and felt there during those formative years has colored his work since: Bandits and revolutions. Exotic birds. Rare and vibrant flowers. Jungle ferns, idyllic gardens. Hungry children begging in front of splendid cathedrals. Mountain farmers planting corn in clouds. Mellifluous Spanish names.

Now writer-in-residence and Professor of English at The University of Tennessee in Knoxville, Wier has all the outward trappings of a Texan--boots, well worn jeans, and a loose, confident walk that smacks of wide-open spaces. If he were a cowboy he'd be called "Slim." His slow drawl and crooked smile reinforce the cowboy image, and the contemporary house where he lives in Knoxville with his artist wife, Donnie, and ten-year-old son, Wesley, is filled with southwestern art and artifacts. But when Wier steps into his classroom at The University of Tennessee, he is mainstream writer, mentor to graduates and undergraduates, and a highly inspirational teacher. Here is a man who loves his work, whether he is at home laboring on a massive novel about a big chunk of southwestern history or in his university classroom, transferring to his students his technical expertise and his unquenchable enthusiasm for storytelling.

Any fact or fiction is material for Wier's vast supply of stories--his past, his present, a newspaper article, a friend's casual anecdote, overheard conversations. The trick is in the retelling, the rearranging and the embellishment, until he somehow manages to make the story his own. In the telling, he wades in slowly, dark eyes sparkling, his grin unfolding with obvious pleasure, and the listener is hooked just as surely as Wier is hooked, even if he has told the story a dozen times before.

How could Allen Wier have been anything other than a writer? Those early years in Mexico plunged him into a constantly evolving fairytale whose dreamlike fascination has played out time and again in his work, especially in his second novel, Departing As Air. Later, Wier's father moved his family to Louisiana where they actually spent more cumulative years than in Texas, but to this day memories of Texas and of Mexico continue to stimulate Wier's imagination and enhance his work.

An only child, Wier was showered with love and attention. He remembers impromptu picnics, ferryboat rides, and carte blanche acceptance into the adult world of his parents.

"I was born in San Antonio," he recounts. "My daddy was from the hill country town of Blanco, about 45 miles north of San Antonio. My mother was an orphan. Shortly after she was born, her mother died and then her grandmother took her. When Mother was nine, while they were in Texas visiting her aunt, her grandmother died. The Texas aunt adopted her, so Mother thinks of herself as a Texan, though she was born in Joplin, Missouri.

"She met Daddy at Southwest Texas State University in San Marcos, which was then Southwest Texas State Teachers' College. Lyndon Johnson had gone to school there and after he became President the college became a university and a lot of nice buildings went up.

"Daddy mowed the college grass and drove a cattle truck part time--he'd back the truck up to a laundry window of the girls' dorm where Mama, disguised by a basket of laundry and with a robe over her clothes, would crawl out and climb on back. He'd coast down the hill, lights off, till they were out of sight and she'd get in the cab and go with him to get a hamburger and dance somewhere." Wier fictionalized this cattle truck date in his third novel, A Place for Outlaws.

"After World War II, Daddy got work in the wholesale flower business. He searched the Mexican flower growing regions and, even, jungles, for varieties of flowers and ferns to import to Texas. His Mexican crew called him El Jefe, 'The Chief,' and El Lobo, 'The Wolf.'" So that his family could be with him, Ralph Wier rented an upstairs apartment from an affluent American widow who had been married to a Mexican. Ralph Wier's business took him to flower growers in the state of Vera Cruz, to villages such as Fortin de las Flores, which means Fortress of the Flowers. "While Daddy was working in Mexico," recalls Wier, "he had a work permit arranged by a Mexican senator; I don't think it was entirely on the up and up, because Daddy got a call one day telling him there was some kind of revolution--a small coup--going on, and he had to get out of the country right away. The senator was about to be deposed; Daddy's arrangement would no longer be valid. There were all kinds of great adventures. In those days there were bandits in Mexico and there were roads with holes in them as big as Jeeps. A driver would have to get out and chop cane beside the road to make enough space to drive around the hole. One morning in Mexico City, Daddy stood up in bed to steady a swaying overhead light and got bucked onto the twin bed beside him. Downstairs, china crashed on tile floors, a woman loudly prayed a rosary. His door jammed, he was about to jump from a window when a tremor opened the door. Another time, on a train to Guadalajara, my daddy sat up all night arguing politics in Spanish with an enormous Mexican who turned out to be the painter, Diego Rivera.

Mexico was an exciting change from San Antonio, where home was a post-war subdivision in which all the houses looked alike. The family sometimes traveled to Mexico by train and sometimes in their bullet-shaped, green Studebaker. On the train Allen and his mother slept on a Pullman car in an upper berth. Images of that train ride appear again and again in Wier's second novel, Departing As Air :

. . . south or north all trains run through Mexico, either down or up. A train so far down, so deep in jungle, Jessie hears leaves, huge and wet, slap the sides of the coach and the windows grow damp with fog and the windows grow dark beneath the shadows of flower blossoms spread like the pink lips of ocelots and jaguars. A train so far up, so high up in mountains, she looks down through white clouds at green lines she only half believes are rows of corn and in the window she stares close-up into the dark, moving eye of the black zopilote, the scavenger of Mexico, flying no higher than Jessie, the shape of his wings and the long body of the train racing on the clouds below.

When they traveled by train, his mother would dress Allen in his Hopalong Cassidy outfit and cowboy boots. Allen also had a fringed, cowhide jacket and handmade, hand tooled chaps with the cow's hair on the outside. "We always met people on the train because I was so polite. I would pull out stranger's chairs for them on the dining car; we met a lot of interesting people because of the good manners my mother had taught me."

During those first five years Wier's only playmate was the young son of a Mexican doctor who lived next door to the American widow in Mexico City. When his friend waved a red shirt from the upstairs window across the courtyard, that was a semaphore signal to meet in the garden. "These memories are silent except for the cries of exotic birds the Mexican doctor kept in cages surrounding the patio where we shouted and whispered and laughed with our arms and hands. There was a fish pond, where, beneath lily pads, ghostly carp appeared and disappeared and huge black goldfish hung, suspended. Surrounded by lush shrubs, bright flowers, and tall trees and, beyond the trees, by a high wall with sharp points of colored glass imbedded along the top to dissuade intruders, we knew little of the harsh truths of the wider world. Among the trees were those called perule which, I'd been told, kept away flies. I don't even know if that's how you spell it, p-e-r-u-l-e. I hesitate to look it up for fear of losing my boy's belief that the perule trees caught tsetse flies on their leaves, sticky green flypaper, and consumed them like the Venus' flytrap I later learned about from a library book called Carnival of Carnivores. The point is, we were safe in our verdant garden, two children of different cultures sharing the wonders of green life. I've forgotten the Mexican boy's name, if I ever knew it. His eyes and hair were dark, like mine, and his smile was quick. Even in the games young boys play, he was polite. A dark shadow, he mimicked my movements, caught the nuances of my gestures and imitated them. I'm sweetly haunted, still, by the memory of that boy's face as it appears reflected in the fish pond.

Afternoons, while the Mexican boy observed the custom of a long siesta, Allen's mother taught him to read, to write, and to count. "I recall the smell of chalk, letters on a small blackboard she set up on an easel, the scrape of the easel's three legs on tile. The letters I remember are: C U T F L O W E R S."

With their son approaching school age, the Wiers returned permanently to the States, first to Texas and later to Louisiana, where Ralph eventually left the flower business to become a salesman representing companies that sold stapling and fastening machines, air-powered nailers and the like.

"Back in the States, in the first grade, I made all A's except for Deportment. There, on a line printed, Works and Plays Well With Others, my report card showed a row of question marks: ? ? ? ? ? ? one for each six-week term. I told my mother if the kids at school were Mexican the question marks would be upside down. I had left that Mexican garden where my playmate couldn't speak my language; I had entered the wider world.

"We shuttled back and forth between Louisiana and Texas," Wier recalls. "We lived in West Monroe and Shreveport. I went to high school in Shreveport, to college in Texas, back to Louisiana for my first graduate degree. We actually spent more years in Louisiana than in Texas, but our family still all lived in Texas. We regularly went back to Blanco to visit my grandmama, Daddy's mama."

"After his wife died and he gave his daughter to her mother to raise, my mama's daddy moved on. He remarried and had one son, my mother's half-brother whom she saw twice. I never met that half-uncle, but I used to imagine visiting him in California where he worked for Walt Disney studios. He'd occasionally phone us late at night, after he'd had a few drinks and forgotten the time zone difference. When I was a teenager, he sent photos of his new wife: a model from London, England, she was cavorting in short shorts up in the limbs of a giant live oak. For years I daydreamed a life in California. My daddy's daddy, who also died before I was born, was a mythical figure in the family. A storyteller and trickster, he would go to great lengths to set up elaborate practical jokes. I grew up hearing how I would have had my own pony if he were alive. They'd say, 'If Herb were here he'd spoil you rotten.' I stared at photographs of him and daydreamed about riding my pony. The family actually had owned a big ranch soon after they came to Texas. My great-grandmother, Herb's mother, gave her three sons the options of keeping the ranch or selling it and dividing the proceeds. They took the money, about $5000 or $10,000 each. This was land they'd bought for maybe 50 cents and acre and sold for 3 or 4 dollars an acre. We used to drive by the place--which had not been in the family in my lifetime, not even in my daddy's lifetime--and I'd fantasize that if those brothers hadn't taken the money and if Granddaddy Herb were still alive, I'd be riding my pony on our ranch right then.

"That probably made me mythologize the place more than I would have if my granddaddy had lived," Wier says now. Visits back to Texas made him sharply aware of the importance of place and created a store of details from which he still draws. His first novel, Blanco, the story of a Texas family in the 1950's, opens with an almost photographic image of the fictionalized town:

Jordan West's Sinclair station was closed, the glassed-in office dark except for the dim glow of the coke machine and a fluorescent clock, blue on the back wall. The Bowling Alley Cafe on the other side of the square would be closed by midnight. No cafe, no filling station, nothing stayed open all night in Blanco. The Lone Star picture show was closed weeknights, Fridays, too, during football season. There was no newspaper, no hospital, no jail. Blanco County was the only county in Texas without an oil well. The courthouse, built in 1886, was empty, an election in 1890 having moved the Blanco County Seat some fourteen miles north to Johnson City.

One downtown streetlight made the shadow of a highway sign on the sidewalk. A flashing yellow light strung across the highway, and ignored by truckers who barreled-ass through town all night long, turned a plate glass reflection of the empty courthouse building off and on. A windmill, looking like an oil derrick above the short trees, was locked still. There was no water running over the new Blanco River Dam. But a westerly breeze and dips in the highway where flood gauge posts measured spring flash floods, suggested motion.

"I think in a funny way your place chooses you," says Wier, "even if it's not where you've lived the most years. Texas is certainly the place I'm from culturally. I never felt I was from Louisiana; I always look West."

Wier was accustomed to moving back and forth, so it didn't bother him later that he grew up with a double dose of religion. His mother was Southern Baptist and his father was Methodist. Wier and his mother went to Sunday School at the Baptist church, then met his father at the Methodist church for the Sunday sermon. "My mother was an open-minded Southern Baptist. My daddy was a good man, but not the kind of good one associates with religiosity. He was smart, sassy, and often profane; he lived with gusto. I grew up hearing the rhythms of his speech, experiencing the sensuous details of his storytelling. My mother would close her eyes and maybe shake her head and say "Oh, Ralph!" when he verged on blasphemy, but her disapproval was never very convincing--the flicker of her smile gave her away, her countenance always about to unfrown itself.

"Both my parents respected the value of doubt; I was always encouraged to question things. In Mexico we attended Roman Catholic Mass and over Sunday dinner my daddy gave me sips of his beer and wisecracked about the priests' skirts while my mother asked me what I thought the services signified. When I complained that I couldn't understand Latin, she didn't give an inch. 'You aren't listening hard enough,' she said. The next time we went to Mass, I listened harder, but Latin did not miraculously enter my ears as English. But, there in the holy hush of the cathedral, the music of the Latin chant danced with shadows cast by votive candles, rose and fell with light through stained glass and for the first time in my life I partly understood what it means to respond, to be moved not by the thing said, but by the way of saying. As a writer, I acknowledge that daily.

"My parents taught me the Bible, but they were never rigid. They didn't interpret the Scriptures literally. They drank alcohol some and trusted my judgment on things like that. My mother taught me how to dance when I was about twelve; she thought a man who wasn't a good dancer was pretty much useless. After my dad would go to bed, my mother would often stay up with me and we'd read the Bible." Those early biblical stories, Wier says, influenced him through both content and style. "We read the whole Bible from front to back more than once. We'd read a section and then talk about it. I loved it; it was never punishment in any way. We also read from a book called Stories of the Bible and from a big book of Charles Dickens' works. We read those books from the time I was about three or four until I was ten or eleven and began to read more books of my own choosing. I had hundreds of comic books, and I especially loved the Classics Illustrated because they would do in a pinch for a school book report.

The notion of becoming a writer didn't actually occur to Wier until he was a junior at Baylor University. At that time he had not declared a major, but was leaning toward philosophy. The war in Vietnam was going on, and he was worried about the draft. "My friends were all headed off to med school or law school; they all knew what they were going to do and I felt desperate to know what I was going to do with my life. A friend at Baylor asked me if I had entered the literary magazine's writing contest. 'You like telling stories,' he said. 'I figured you'd write a story for the contest.'"

"And then a funny thing happened. My roommate and I were burglarized. We rented a little, rundown house near campus that we called The Hole. I wrote a story about going with the police detective to the house of the teenaged burglar to retrieve our stolen property." Then Wier wrote a second story drawing on his summer job on the railroad. The stories won both first and second place in the Baylor literary contest. The judges said that Wier could have first place, he couldn't win both. Both stories were published in the campus literary magazine, The Phoenix. "That was the first time I saw my stuff in print. Later, in graduate school, I revised the second-place story, "Cops and Robbers," and the Southern Review bought it--the first work I ever had accepted for publication.

"Winning that contest stroked my ego. Maybe I could do this fiction writing. I liked it. I started hanging out at Big Boy's Truck Stop in Waco, where rodeo couples mingled with Baylor students. They had a good jukebox, good hamburgers, and a waitress named Sudie who'd keep your cup filled with coffee and not charge you extra. I'd go there and play Hank Williams and drink free coffee all night and fill up long, yellow legal tablets with the stuff I was writing.

"At that time, Baylor offered no creative writing classes, and in the four years I was at the university I never met or even saw a writer. Because I had graduated from a Louisiana high school, one of my professors wrote a letter recommending me for LSU's graduate English program. LSU wrote to say they were developing a graduate program in creative writing. They were holding an assistantship for me; I had ten days in which to apply. It was either LSU or Vietnam. I fired off an application and before I knew it I was back in Louisiana." In Baton Rouge he met author David Madden who'd just been hired to develop the writing program at the university. "It took years to get that program going. It didn't happen while I was there, which was another lucky break for me since, as the only graduate student in fiction, I had a sort of tutorial, with Madden as my teacher. Never have I learned as much about how to read, and therefore, how to write. For the first time, I understood how technique could be moving and exciting. Beginning with Madden, the first writer I ever met, nothing has inspirited me so much as the generous friendship of other writers: George Garrett, Bill Frank, Richard Dillard, Bill Goyen, Russ Vliet, Tom Rabbitt, Don Hendrie, Marnie Prange, Greg Pape, John Engels, Frank Bergon, Alan Chuese, Lee Smith, Beverly Lowry, Kent Nelson, Ted Solotaroff, Brendan Galvin, Dick Bausch, Jon Manchip White--to all these and several others, I owe debts I can never repay.

During the two years Wier spent in graduate school at LSU, the war in Vietnam was at its peak. Like many other young men of that era, Wier was deeply troubled by American involvement in Southeast Asia. At Baylor, he had protested the war. His decision to demonstrate caused the very first rift between him and his father, a World War II veteran. Ralph Wier believed, no matter what the nation's motives, young men should serve their country. "Vietnam is the only thing that ever came between my daddy and me," says Wier. "Because I'm an only child, and because I was with my parents constantly in Mexico, we were always really, really close. There had never been anything I could not talk to them about.

"I remember walking around Waco on a blustery March night, smoking those little sweet cigars with wooden tips and feeling very melodramatic. Of course I was afraid of being wounded or killed, but I was also afraid I might be forced to kill someone. That kept haunting me. Could I kill another human? I was patriotic. I was taking philosophy and religion courses, reading a lot and being influenced by what I read. After having been a Southern Baptist all my life--I had been a prayer group leader and I'd given the invocations at our high school football games--I declared myself an atheist. About the same time, I declared my major in philosophy and bought a pipe in which I smoked a tobacco my daddy said smelled like candy.

"At Baylor, it was easy to be a radical. I was one of about six people who protested the war. All we did was stand silently by the statue of Judge Baylor; we got spat on by some students who walked by and that was it. In the years I was at Baylor that was about the extent of any anti-war activity on campus. But at such a conservative school it was a pretty big deal.

"I got to be a radical without risking much. It was all fairly predictable, post-freshman identity crisis kind of stuff. I liked to shock my folks, when I was home, by saying that I was a communist, an atheist. My dad would say, 'Naw, you're not.' And, of course, he was right.

"Every time my daddy and I talked about the war in vietnam, he'd get emotional. He'd say, 'You've got a college degree, you'll get some cushy desk job.' Well, I knew they were sending people with college degrees into combat; Daddy just didn't realize how different this was from the war he'd been in. I loved my country, but I believed America was in Vietnam for financial reasons, primarily. I wanted to do the right thing, whatever that was. I admired most of the young men who had gone to Canada or Sweden, but I didn't want to leave America and not be able to return, and I didn't think I had the courage to face being thought of as a draft dodger. Finally, I sat down and on one of those long, yellow legal pads I wrote fiction on, I wrote my dad a long letter about Vietnam and why I felt the war was wrong. A good while passed and I didn't hear from him. Eventually my mother wrote saying he'd received my letter and that it meant a great deal to him. She said they both loved me and would support any decision I made. I was hurt that Daddy didn't answer personally. I hadn't told him not to show Mother my letter, but I had addressed to him only--a way I never sent letters home.

"Later I was given a 1-Y medical deferment because a family doctor diagnosed gout, which I don't think was gout because it was a pain that manifested itself in my neck. I think it was caused by stress and worry about the draft. The deferment allowed me to go to graduate school and meant we didn't have to deal with Vietnam when I went home. A decade later, after Daddy died, I was helping my mother go through some of his things. She handed me his wallet. In it was my ten-year-old letter, folded into a big, fat square. Mother said he'd carried the letter with him ever since he'd gotten it, and that he'd read it not long before he died. I told her I'd been hurt that he hadn't answered me personally, and she said Daddy hadn't known how to respond. He'd been afraid he might say the wrong thing. Finally, I understood. Maybe I understand even better now that I have a son of my own.

Wier's story, "Things About to Disappear," includes some of the details of his father's last days:

After nine months of sickness, slipping away from us a little more each day, my daddy died. Finally the cancer got an artery, it burst, and he went out in a rush. We buried him on a windy, limestone hill beneath a twisted live oak. It was a time of leaving, the tail end of a sad summer. He was gone, and I was going, leaving Texas again.

Wier often depended heavily on his father's advice. The summer between his freshman and sophomore years at college he was working a minimum wage job in a sash and door factory, standing in one place all day nailing the same parts together over and over. At supper one evening, he described the mindless nature of his summer job. "If you have a complaint," his father said, "write the President." Allen Wier did exactly that. He wrote a letter to Lyndon B. Johnson, who just happened to be a Texan and whose parents just happened to have shared a duplex with a Wier who'd been Sheriff of Blanco County. Wier sent the letter to his grandmama and asked her to mail it, thinking a Blanco postmark might get the President's attention. A week later, Wier came home from work and his father announced that the President had called. "Yeah, sure," Wier said, laughing. But during supper that evening the telephone rang and it was a presidential aide who told Wier the President had arranged a job for him with the National Park Service. He could pick Yellowstone or the Grand Tetons, but he was due on the job the following Monday. It was then Wednesday. The next few days were a blur of activity, getting his 1960 Mercury Comet, paid for with paper route earnings, ready for the trip across country and packing for a summer in Wyoming in the Tetons. The job was clearing trees and constructing mountain trails. "We packed in supplies on mule trains; our camp was at 10,000 feet and we worked above there, cutting a horseback trail up through Paintbrush Canyon." That summer in Wyoming was an experience that broadened his experience in several ways. It was the first time he'd been so far from home on his on, and around people with vastly different backgrounds. Most of the other laborers were the sons of diplomats and high-ranking government employees. Books were traded back and forth--Descartes, Kant, Neitzche, Marx as well as pop books of the time such as all the James Bond novels. In late-night discussions only one young man, a Catholic, said he believed in God; that was an unusual situation for a Baptist attending Baylor to find himself in.

"In those days, I was eager to leave the South. Keenly aware of political issues, I was concerned not only about the Vietnam war, but, also, segregation. The summer after Wyoming I came back to Shreveport and worked for the railroad. I got involved in helping a local, black man run for Congress, and my parents worried because the police photographed us going to meetings in black churches. The ultra-conservative, white incumbent became alarmed and got out the vote. He was re-elected by a landslide. I wanted to leave the South; I had fallen for the myth that southerners are generally less educated, less enlightened, and more narrow-minded than people in other parts of America. I wanted to go live up north where people were open-minded and exciting and intellectual and where there was no racism or small-mindedness.

"Years later I took a teaching job at Carnegie-Mellon in Pittsburgh and my neighbor, a guy who worked for U.S. Steel, invited my wife and me over for dinner, and the first thing he did was make a racial slur about a black quarterback who played for the Steelers. How do you respond to something like that, except to realize that if bigotry were just geographical we could cut off a certain part of the country and be done with it. Experiences like that made me want to come back to the South.

"While I was away from the South, I wrote about it. I saw it more vividly, though I don't know if I saw it more objectively. I might have been more subjective, because I was writing out of a kind of homesickness; writing about the South was a way to go there. I used to believe metaphorically in the transforming power of the imagination, but increasingly I believe literally in this power.

Wier has come to discover that the South has an unusual hold on the writer. "There are probably more writers per square mile in the South than anywhere else on earth," he says. "It seems to me that in the places I've lived in the South--and it's true of Knoxville--people who are writing come out of the woodwork. Southerners write family histories, histories of towns and communities and, even, hollers. There's a great interest in preserving the past, of making local landscapes and their inhabitants immortal. In some southern town you might be a crazy person or behave badly or be alcoholic or on drugs, but you belong, you are our crazy person or our drunk, so you're okay.

"I used to think southerners were obsessed with the Civil War because they wanted to revise the history of a defeated people. Maybe because my family was Texan, I grew up hearing stories about fighting Santa Anna at the Alamo or Quannah Parker and his Comanches at Adobe Walls, but I never heard any Civil War stories. So my heroes were always Indians and cowboys--Indians first because they were stealthier and stronger and wilder. That we often imitate those we contemplate, strikes me as one of the fiction writer's blessings.

"My ten-year-old son, Wesley, cannot read a Bugs Bunny comic book without running to the kitchen for a carrot, and when I read to him stories about the Knights of the Round Table he uses one of his mother's jackets for a knight's cloak. For Wesley, reading fiction is an occasion literally to put on the cloak of some other character. For me--for you, too, probably--reading (and writing) fiction is an occasion imaginatively to put on the cloak of some other character. Literally, in childhood, and imaginatively, of late, I've put on ten gallon hats and buffalo head warbonnets. A few years ago, while enjoying a Dobie-Paisano fellowship (from the Texas Institute of Letters and the University of Texas) that included residency on J. Frank Dobie's remote ranch west of Austin, I began a "western" I had long longed to write. The cowboys and Indians I'd adulated all my life came from family stories or, worse, from Hollywood. So, before I wrote a page, I spent months reading the facts about cowboys and about Comanche Indians. The facts are so seductive they challenge my imagination. 'If I spoiled the portrait,' Gide says, 'it was because I clung too closely to reality. The difficult thing is inventing when you are encumbered by memory.' Sometimes, what are hardest to forget are the facts.

In Cloud of Witnesses--the working title of the "western" novel (a manuscript now 1200 pages long) that Wier is presently completing--there are dozens of characters he is eager to spend time with daily--Indians, cowboys, Mexicans, runaway slaves, Civil War soldiers, German immigrants. "I prefer writing novels to writing stories because I like knowing that over a long period, every day, I can return to again and again to a certain place, to the same characters.

Whether Wier has created those characters or whether his characters have created Wier is a moot point. And whether he is southern or southwestern is also a moot point. "As soon as you come up with some definition of what southern writing is, a southern writer will come along and confound you with southern writing that doesn't fit the definition," he says.

"A friend told me recently that it is the southerner's absolute belief in original sin that sets him apart. When I was a kid and my daddy barbecued beef brisket, I stared at the coals and tried to imagine Hell. Now that I'm older, I've seen the Devil more than once. I acknowledge a fallen world that contains unspeakable evil and the daily suffering of innocents. I bathe Wesley, bump a soft bar of soap down his bent back as he leans over giggling in the tub, feel beneath my fingers the fragility and vulnerability of his spine, and I remember running shirtless with my Mexican playmate in that Edenic garden where not even flies were allowed. The next morning's newspaper brings the face of evil into my kitchen with any number of facts. I no longer find the Devil difficult to picture. It's an unspeakably evil world, true, but, I'm thankful, that's not the only truth. The Scriptures remind us that God causes his sun to rise on the bad as well as the good, and sends down rain to fall on the upright and the wicked alike. That revelation used to bother me, now it reassures me.

"Writers like to make things out of words. They are the lovers and namers of the world. So long as the act of writing brings pleasure, a writer should continue, even if he or she knows there may be no readers for this work." That has never been a problem for Wier, who has been compared to Sherwood Anderson, Robert Penn Warren, William Goyen, Wright Morris and to the western writer Larry McMurtry.

In the meantime, his stories continue to absorb us and his characters to involve us because it is so easy to see ourselves through their lives, like June and Cage in Blanco: "They sat, listening to the sound of their own quiet sipping and swallowing, the refrigerator motor, the steady fall of rain."

That's Allen Wier the writer talking, embellishing, refining, elaborating on real life. He's there in that scene with us, but he's creating it in such a subtle and practiced way that we don't realize his presence, only the transforming power of his imagination.