I'm going to start with what is perhaps an annoying question, but as a fellow North Carolinian, it's one I feel I have to ask: do you think of yourself as a Southern writer? The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break is set in the South, but is there anything about it that makes it a particularly "Southern" novel, in your view?

I think that my brain, my soul, my language are rooted in the South, are informed by the rhythms and pace there. That said, I'm making a conscious effort to migrate in the fourth novel and subsequent novels. I believe that boundaries should be leaped.

The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break started out as a poem. Was this a help or a hindrance in writing the novel? For example, you've mentioned in other interviews that The Minotaur isn't a plot-driven novel--was this primarily because it started out the way that it did?

The poem, too, was quite narrative. It established the premise and the emotional tone that carried through the novel. I'm not sure if I would call the poem either a hindrance or a help, only that it is very much a part of the whole. The relative plotlessness of the novel has much to do with the conceit. I wanted to manipulate time (and the reader's experience of time).

Why the Minotaur? What was it about him, or the myth, that piqued your interest?

I suppose I've always been drawn to the strange, the perverse. Few things are more perverse than our myths, whether taken from Ovid or the King James Bible. I don't recall thinking about or studying the myth of the Minotaur before conceiving of the poem. The idea itself simply arrived in my head one afternoon. I love it when that happens!

Other than your own novel, what's your favorite piece of writing or work of art about the Minotaur?

I kept several of Picasso's Minotaur prints taped on the wall near my desk throughout the writing of the novel. Too, there's a great Minotaur painting by Watts in the Tate.

A major theme in the novel is the persistence of myth in our everyday lives, not only Greek myths, but modern-day mythic heroes such as, it seemed to me, NASCAR drivers, represented by the character who watches races all the time. Is the novel making a comment about the debasement of myth in the modern world? Are our modern-day myths about, say, Dale Earnhardt, less compelling than the ancient ones? Or is your view of myth less judgmental: they are stories that give our lives meaning and structure, and it doesn't really matter if these stories are about half-men half-bulls or men behind the wheels of powerful machines?

Debasement is a judgment, and one I'm sure I'm guilty of. Aren't we all? But, I hope that my intent was driven more by what you ask in the last question. Transformation. Reconfiguration. Adaptation. Everything evolves, and fighting evolution seems silly.

Is my previous life as a literary scholar coming back to haunt me, or is Sweeny's refusal to bury his dog a parody of Antigone?

Why is that ghosts are always smarter than me?

This a question I raised in my commentary on Bookmuse.com. I'd like to hear your response: "Sherrill appears to view sexuality very negatively: the Minotaur and Kelly are forced to listen to a porn film on their date; Gene sells pornographic videos; chat lines advertise sex on television; and workers at Grub's scribble crude graffiti about the body parts of their co-workers on the walls of the bathroom. Is there any sense in which sexuality is a positive force in the novel? Do any characters seem to have healthy sexual relationships?"

Our entire culture/society has, historically, expressed ridiculously hypocritical negative attitudes toward sexuality. I feel that the desire for sexual connection is so primal (we are, after all, animals) that it will not be denied. However, because we are human animals, we're masters of repression and displacement. What seems to happen when we want what we can't help but want (sex), and strive--and struggle, mightily--to get it (sex), and being shamed and chastised and threatened with hell-fire-and-damnation for even wanting something so wicked (sex), what happens is that sexual connection is somehow disconnected from emotional intimacy. Sexual union is powerful. Genuine emotional intimacy is even more so. Combine the two and . . . anyway, the characters in the Minotaur struggle with these issues just like everyone else. But, like me, they're not always conscious of the struggle, and never quite sure which desire is in charge of the day.

Your new novel is coming out, I believe, in June 2004. Can you tell us about it? I know that you've mentioned in another interview that this one is more plot-driven than The Minotaur. Many writers find the second novel difficult to write; was taking a different approach a way for you to deal with this problem?

To answer your first question, I've included below a project plan written for a grant application. As for the different approach with novel #2, my writing process was exactly the same, so that wasn't the issue. What's hardest about the second novel is that the Minotaur has gotten, and continues to get, so much positive attention that, when my insecurities rear their ugly heads I worry that Visits From the Drowned Girl will somehow fall short.

Mocksville Lights, my novel in progress, is a romp. To be precise, a biblical romp. DooDoo Bigat lords over his domain--the Purdy Gator Trailer Court, in the town of Lumberton, ragged, gasping conjoined-sister-town of the more glamorous Mocksville, renowned (to the point of dangerous envy) for its Christmas light display--with both benevolence and vengeance, depending on the moment. An entrepreneur, in the loosest most pitiful sense of the word, DooDoo strives doggedly to get ahead, to stay ahead (afloat?) in a world that is unraveling at every seam. DooDoo struggles, sometimes mightily, sometimes not so, with himself, with the community at large, and with adamantly misguided tenants: a business partner who turns against him; a truck stop chaplain with a wicked secret; twin sisters with a lucrative internet porn business; a buff, tanned do-gooder with a penchant for big hair and karaoke; an ultra-thrifty mother cum cut-rate Martha Stewart type who cans or pickles anything that stops moving for a minute; the lame, the sinful, the suffering, the righteous, lovers and loveless; and of course his do-less son.

As a writer, I like to challenge myself. With my first novel, The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break, I wanted to render the implausible real. I wanted to pluck a familiar character out of his world and place him in my very different world: the contemporary American south. And I wanted to manipulate time and pace, to focus on tone and emotion over plot. In the second novel, Visits From the Drowned Girl, set in the same place, I vowed only humans, and chose to reveal them at their darkest. I wanted to create the whole story, and the characters, and to make the complicated plot an important part of the book's appeal.

In Mocksville Lights, I have two goals. First, I'm taking stories that had such impact on me as a child, stories from the King James Bible, stories told and retold, interpreted and reinterpreted, tailored and edited to suit various needs, misheard, misremembered, possibly even made up and retelling them in the time and place, both literally and emotionally, of my two previous novels. And, I'll have a high old time doing it. My second goal with Mocksville Lights is tonal. The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break is very lyric, a 312-page poem. Visits From the Drowned Girl is a bleak, hard book. I wanted to provide some ballast. First and foremost Mocksville Lights will be comic. But given my source, and my belief that sometimes suffering--and lordy how we suffer over the things we take so seriously--is the funniest thing in the world, the humor will be masked and cloaked from time to time.

Both my first and second novels were written--after gathering periods during which I collect, mold, shape, and order the material from which the books are made--in about a year's time each. The continuing success of The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break has kickstarted and propelled my career as a novelist and professor forward. That success has set some expectations for Visits From the Drowned Girl. It has also, mysteriously or not so, increased my grown-up responsibilities. There seemed to be more time in the world when I was writing the other two books.

I have already completed the most uncertain phase of writing Mocksville Lights, the gathering and shaping phase. At this time I'm about 9,000 words into the book, and I'm anticipating it to finish around 70,000 words in length. What the Guggenheim Award would do is allow me to buy myself time, through relieving my teaching load, and to finish my book.

Structurally, I want Mocksville Lights to parallel (oh so loosely) the format of the King James Bible: thirty-nine books in the Old Testament, twenty-seven in the New: the Historical Narratives, the Wisdom books, the Prophecies, the Gospels and Acts, Letters, and the Apocalypse texts. Having the structure provided for me entails new kinds of challenges. Most importantly, I'm committed to rendering my characters with humanity and dignity, and to dealing honestly with the very real complexities of devotion and faith. However, the structure, the content, and the characters will be at the mercy of my memory and imagination. The choice of stories to include is highly selective, and I take ample license with altering, blending, and eliminating characters. It's not too unlike taking epic struggles and themes and issues and boiling them down to the scale of a flea-circus. Admission is free.

Thanks so much for the questions.