Dear Jane,
In the fall of 1998, in my capacity as co-editor of my high school newspaper, I interviewed author Carl Hiaasen when he came to town promote his book Lucky You. Being seventeen and totally ignorant of author-reader protocols, I more or less ambushed him at Books-A-Million, and he proved to be an astonishingly nice guy—he gave me a lengthy interview (I was a big fan; I had a lot of questions.) even though his flight had arrived hours late and he was obviously running a fever. I promised him the interview would never appear in anything but the paper for which I was writing, and I’ve kept that promise—which is why, if you count my dad and the faculty advisor, maybe seven people have ever read it. High-schoolers, as I painfully discovered the next Monday, were not Hiaasen’s biggest audience.
But, my cretin classmates aside, the experience was amazing and I remain to this day impressed by Hiaasen’s love of nature, wrathful views on corruption, and unconventional sense of justice. These things, as well …
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