Here's a Barry H. interview from the Paris Review to warm you up this cool MA morning.
There’s a line in Barry Hannah’s most recent novel, Yonder StandsYour Orphan (2001), that nicely describes his life and career thus far. “You need to see a bit of hell now and then,” he writes. “Thatand great joy.” In the years since he published his first novel, Geronimo Rex (1972, a National Book Award finalist), Hannahhas experienced a lot of both. His reputation as a hard-boiled drinker from Mississippi who liked guns, rode motorcycles, and sometimes raised a little too much hell was of a piece with his early fiction—the stunning and painful prose, the raucous characters, the furious energy. These days, Hannah is considerably less hell-bound, and his work more sensitive, though none the less powerful for it.As he likes to say of the book he’s working on now, “There’s a lot of Christ in it.”
That's how I'll always remember him.