SOURCE: An interview in Publishers Weekly, Vol. 237, No. 31, August 3, 1990, pp. 59-60.

In the following interview, Harrison discusses his writing career and the major themes and characters of his work.

Though he spent brief periods in New York and Boston during his restless youth and though his riotous visits to Key West, Fla., and Hollywood with his friend Tom McGuane have been the subject of numerous journalistic accounts, Jim Harrison's home has always been in northern Michigan. He and his wife, Linda, live on a farm about 50 miles as the crow flies from Grayling, where he grew up. It's only a short drive from their house to Lake Michigan, across which lies the Upper Peninsula, even more rural and remote, where Harrison has a cabin he retreats to in the warmer weather—"Summer," wisecracks a character in his new book, The Woman Lit by Fireflies, . . . "being known locally as...