I've been writing fiction (with "serious" intent) for some 37 years. A graduate of the University of Denver creative writing doctoral program, I taught at colleges and universities in New York, Ohio, Mississippi (where I founded Mississippi Review in 1973), and Oklahoma, where I took early retirement from Oklahoma State University (where I edited Cimarron Review)in 1995. Since then I've taught fiction workshops as an adjunct professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, my undergraduate alma mater.

Prior to all this I served three years in the U.S. Army, the source of my first novel, Count a Lonely Cadence (1968), which was adapted as the movie Cadence (1991), which starred Martin and Charlie Sheen. Even when you get lucky, it takes a while, what?

In this nearly four decades, I've published more than a hundred stories in literary magazines, four novels, and eight story collections; the ninth, tentatively entitled Long Odds, will come out from University of Missouri Press in the spring of 2000.

"A Carted Whore" is a chapter from a novel-in-the-works, which I call Kempe, Dancing! Other chapters have appeared in The Literary Review, American Literary Review, and Chariton Review.." Kempe's Nine Days Wonder," the story that follows, is also from this novel.

Will Kempe, as Shakespearians will know, was an actor/comedian in Shakespeare's company, best known for his role as Bottom. A part-owner in the Globe Theater, he sold his interest and went on to perform the marathon comic Morris dance portrayed in the enclosed chapter. He is said to have died about 1601 or 1602.

This has been a true struggle to write, alternating my mock-Elizabethan dialogue with Pinky Perlmutter's "Yinglish." Perlmutter, my narrator, is purely fictional. And I've had to scrounge up enough Elizabethan era "detail" to, I hope, make the context persuasive. In any case, I'm closing in on the end of this project, hope to have it done by year's end.

I think what I'm after, ultimately, in this fiction has to do with the cultural High Art icon Shakespeare has been for us. I think there's as much Low Art as high (witness Kempe's clown roles), and tend to think that's where the true "vitality" in Shakespeare resides. Of course I'm also interested in an aged man's (Pinky) effort to find solace, if not "meaning," in his memories.