My first paying work—well back in the last century—was picking cucumbers for thirty-five cents a hundredweight; since then, I've done a lot of other things in order to pay the bills, including teaching medieval literature and working as an antiques dealer. Living in Morgantown, WV, has given me a new appreciation for my own Appalachian roots, and it's been fun for the last few years to spend an hour or two a day writing about Appalachia through the eyes of Big Jim—an outsider and observer as mystified, sometimes, by the foibles of humanity as I am.