It's the making of the book, a process having a touch of the universal. It's not the author who's important in the story. In that way, 'Writing Blue Highways' is more autobiographical than its progenitor, but it, too, I trust, goes well beyond me. 'Blue Highways' itself, to use your phrase, cracked the doors on my psyche, although the point of the book is not so much my heart and mind but the lives of people I met along the road. After several months, I felt it did, and now I can only hope readers will be similarly inclined. To crib from publisher's jargon, I wanted to discover whether the tale had legs. I followed the events along to learn where this second journey might lead, fully aware that it could be a dead end. Heat-Moon: The story behind the making of 'Writing Blue Highways' was persistent enough for me finally to give in to it so I might see how the tale would turn out as a book. Whether or not to let readers into your personal life obviously was of concern to you.

Since publication of 'Blue Highways,' which spent 42 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list in 1983–84, internationally known author and Boone County resident William Least Heat-Moon has had eight books published, including the latest, 'Writing Blue Highways.' In a series of email exchanges following a recent in-person meeting, Fayette-based writer Don Cullimore posed the questions presented here to Heat-Moon about this canon of literary works.Ĭullimore: 'Writing Blue Highways' is an intriguing but unusual book that you admit poses some risk to an author who willingly cracks the door on his psyche to the public and admits his all-too-human foibles.

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