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James Lee Burke is the author of numerous novels. He grew up in Texas and Louisiana and now splits his time between the two states, where his latest novel is set. In the Moon of Red Ponies follows the transplanted Texan attorney Billy Bob Holland to Montana where his nemesis Wyatt Dixon, who Holland once sent to prison, is on the loose and harassing Holland's loved ones.

Burke's work has twice been awarded an Edgar for Best Crime Novel of the Year. The Lost Get-Back Boogie was nominated for a Pulitzer. Two of his novels, Heaven's Prisoners and Two For Texas, have been made into motion pictures.

The Moon of the Red Ponies has been nominated for the Pulitzer and the National Book Award. But you are a role model for the writer who starts fast and then hits a roadblock. You had a nearly 15-year dry spell where you received more than 100 rejections. What kept you going?

I'd published three novels when I was a young man and it was remarkable to have done as much as I did. I thought my career was well established. I wrote a novel called The Lost Get-Back Boogie, and I thought I would just published, and that did not happen. I stayed out of hardback print for 13 years.

The Lost Get-Back Boogie was rejected 111 times, and that's when I met my current agent, Philip Spitzer. He was driving a cab in Hell's Kitchen [New York City], and he took my account. He was my cousin Andre Debusse's agent and Andre, at that time, did not have the recognition that he has today. But Philip kept the work under submission all those years and Louisiana State University Press published it.

I really learned an old lesson that I had learned as a young man: You do it a day at a time. You write as well as you can, you put it in the mail, you leave it under submission, you never leave it at home. I had a rule for myself, I'd never leave a manuscript at home longer than 36 hours. It would be back under submission in a day-and-a-half. But I realized that an artist will never have any serenity unless he accepts the following premise: You write as well as you can, or you create a song or a sculpture or a painting, and then you turn it loose, you turn it over to some power outside of yourself and you don't worry about its fate. If you do that, success and money and fame, all that stuff, will find you of their own accord, not because you seek them.

You said, "God might choose fools and people who glow with neurosis for his partners in creation, but he doesn't make mistakes." During those dry years, did you have a clear sense that writing was your calling? 

My experience is not unique if you think of the writers who have struggled through adversity. Annie Proulx, for example, suffered years of poverty and lack of acceptance. Cormack McCarthy labored in obscurity and poverty for many years. Almost all the good ones pay those dues, but they never doubt the gift that was presented to them. You always know, no matter what anybody says about it, that it's there for a reason. It's kind of a terrible arrogance, and you don't care if people denigrate you.

At what point did your sense of religious identity become your own?

I was raised Roman Catholic, and I'm a practicing Catholic today. I learned a lot of lessons during that period when I could sell nothing. There's nothing like rejection to make you do an inventory of yourself. I received literally hundreds and hundreds of rejections. I used to save all my rejection slips because I told myself, one day I'm going to autograph these and auction them. And then I lost the box.

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June (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48