[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 three months of bad sledding."

The initial reason Harrison decided to return to the Mid-west was financial. "After my first book was published [the poetry collection Plain Song, in 1965] we had nearly 15 years where I averaged only 10 grand a year," he says candidly. "I needed a place with a low overhead."

But there was more to it than that; when Legends of the Fall, a trio of novellas released in 1979, added a measure of economic security to his already established critical reputation, he chose to remain in Michigan. "Ever since I was seven and had my eye put out, I'd turn for solace to rivers, rain, trees, birds, lakes, animals," he explains. "If things are terrible beyond conception and I walk for 25 miles in the forest, they tend to go away for a while. Whereas if I lived in Manhattan I couldn't escape them."

He steers clear of urban literary life for the same reason he has steadfastly turned down academic jobs. "I had this whole heroic notion of being a novelist," he says. "I wanted to be a writer in the old sense of staying on the outside. I can live for about a year on the proceeds from the first draft of a screenplay, which sometimes takes only six weeks, and I think that's more fun than hanging around some fucking college town for 10 months waiting for summer vacation."

Like his characters, the author is blunt and outspoken, with an earthy sense of humor and a boundless supply of charm that take the sting out of his sallies. When he's said something especially outrageous, he glances slyly at PW, inviting us to share his enjoyment of how wicked he is. Yet he also sprinkles his conversation with quotes from Yeats, Camus, Santayana and Wittgenstein—Harrison is a complex man, by no means the macho figure some critics have taken him for.

This complexity can be seen in his work, both in the poetry collected in such volumes as Returning to Earth and, most recently, The Theory and Practice of Rivers, and in the series of novels and novellas for which he is best known, including A Good Day to Die, Warlock, Sundog, the remarkable Dalva—in which he definitively refuted the claim that he couldn't create believable women—and his latest. Though Harrison writes of such contemporary subjects as the rape of the natural landscape and the search for a meaning beyond materialism, none of his books can be reduced to a simple, one-sentence thesis. There is a mystery at the heart of each, a sense that beneath his beautiful, deceptively simple language lie deeper truths that can only be hinted at with words.

All of his ideas, he says, come to him in the form of images. The heroine of the title story in The Woman Lit by Fireflies first appeared as "a lady of about 49 climbing a fence behind a Welcome Center in tennis shoes. I had been thinking about Clare for years, worrying about her—you make somebody up and then you worry if she's going to be okay. I usually think about a novella or a novel for three or four years; all these images collect—Wallace Stevens said that images tend to collect in pools in your brain—and then when it's no longer bearable not to write it down, I start writing."

"The images emerge from dreams, or the period at 5:30 in the morning between sleeping and waking when you have that single durable image, like Nordstrom had taken to dancing alone' [the opening line of "The Man Who Gave Up His Name" in Legends of the Fall], which totally concentrates the character. I think you try not to figure out what they mean at that point, because what you're trying to do in fiction is reinvent the form; I want every fictional experience I have to be new. Once it gets didactic, than I say, Well, why not just write an essay? You don't create something so that people can draw conclusions, but to enlarge them, just as you have been enlarged by the experience of making it up. Art should be a process of discovery, or it's boring."

Harrison's own life has been a process of discovery. At age 16, in 1954, he decided he wanted to be a writer and headed for New York City, where he stumbled on "what I at the time called Green-wich Village," he says, pronouncing it like the color and laughing. "That's when I knew I wanted to be a bohemian; I wanted to meet a girl with black hair and a black turtleneck—and I did! Then I lived in Boston when I was 19; I went up there because I'd heard Boston was America's St. Petersburg, and my biggest enthusiasm in my teens was for Russian literature." He managed to squeeze in an education around his voyages, graduating from Michigan State in 1960, the same year he got married.

"I started out as a prose writer," he says. "Prose, poetry, I never separated them. But in your first notebook stage you tend toward poetry, because it's easier at that age. I tried to write prose, but I was never any good at the short story." In his mid-20s, while living in Cambridge, Mass., with his wife and baby daughter, "I discovered the Grolier Bookstore, where I used to hang out with other poets. I'd written some poems and sent them to Denise Levertov, who was the only poet I'd ever met. My friends at Grolier had mixed feelings when I arrived one Saturday with my first contract for a book of poems—that wasn't supposed to happen for a long time!"

But the proceeds from poetry weren't sufficient to keep Harrison in the East after a year at Stony Brook convinced him he wasn't cut out to be a teacher. By 1966 he and his family were settled in Michigan. It was nearly five years before he made another try at prose, prompted by his friend and fellow Michigan State grad, novelist Tom McGuane. "I fell off a cliff bird-hunting and hurt my back. Tom said—he barely remembers this—'Well, you're not doing anything else, so why not write a novel?' I thought, Yeah, that's the ticket, and so I wrote Wolf; I had a Guggenheim, which made it easier. I sent my only copy to my brother, who was the science librarian at Yale, because I didn't want to pay to have it copied, but I sent it away two days before the mail strike, and it was lost. He went down to the main post office and finally dug it up. I had a book of poems [Outlyer and Ghazals, 1971] coming out with Simon & Schuster at the time, and they took the novel too, so I started out with a bang."

Alix Nelson at S & S was the first in a long line of nurturing women editors for Harrison. He speaks warmly of Pat Irving at Viking, who published his third novel, Farmer, and Pat Ryan, "who saved my neck, because she would give me assignments to write outdoor pieces for Sports Illustrated, and they paid well enough for us to live up here for several months."

The period after Farmer was published in 1976 was a difficult one, however. "It sold only a couple thousand copies—it sold 10 times as many copies last year as when it came out—and it was a terrible disappointment. I thought, If this is the best I can do, and it's utterly and totally rejected, then I don't know where I'm even supposed to be. There didn't seem to be any room for what I wanted to do; what I valued most, no one in the literary community valued. I went into a long clinical depression, but I gradually recovered."

Professional salvation came in the form of Seymour Lawrence, then affiliated with Delacorte, who made Legends of the Fall Harrison's first commercially successful book. "I had written these three novellas, and my agent at the time said, 'No one's going to publish these; they're not short stories and they're not novels.' I thought, Sam Lawrence has a good record for taking literary writers and giving them a shot, so I sent them to him. Then Clay Felker did the whole of "Legends of the Fall" and three-quarters of "Revenge" [the third novella] in Esquire."

If Legends didn't exactly make Harrison rich, it did make him much more widely known; the sale of film rights to all three novellas enabled him to buy land in Michigan and launched the screenwriting career that now allows him to attend to his real writing with a minimum of distractions. Since that book, Harrison has followed Lawrence from house to house. "Sam's mostly a publisher and a very acute reader," he says. "The kind of author he wants is someone who knows his stuff."

For the line work every novel needs, the author has relied on his eldest daughter, who reads his manuscripts before anyone else, and two editors associated with Lawrence. "Leslie Wells edited Dalva at Dutton, and she is so pointed. I tend to organize something dramatic and then back away from it, and she can always see it. The first sexual scene between Duane and Dalva was too emotional for me to write, and both Leslie and my daughter said, 'Hey, let's let 'em really do it!' Now there's a wonderful girl who works for Sam, Camille Hykes, who's a good editor too." His financial negotiations are handled by "my Sicilian agent, Bob Dattila, which obviously means 'from Attila'—so he has always been my main protector!"

In recent years, Harrison's ride on what he describes as "this shuddering elevator that is the writer's life" has been relatively smooth. Though he considers poetry and fiction his primary work, he doesn't disdain the movies. "I'll keep writing screenplays even if I don't need the money, because I want to write one really good one. You can't write novels all the time, and I'm intrigued by the screenplay form." He is polite about the recent film made from "Revenge," starring Kevin Costner. "John Huston wanted to direct it 12 years ago, with Jack Nicholson, and Warner Brothers turned him down. It was disappointing to me at the time, but when they finally made it, it was almost a real good movie—almost. It did well in California, the South and the Midwest, but not in New York. I doubt your average yuppie would think much of somebody dying for love—it would be out of the question."

There's a certain combativeness in Harrison's attitude toward the New York literary establishment but, he says, "it would be pompous of me to feel ignored when all nine of my books are in print. It's just that the nature of my books isn't by and large the kind of thing that interests Upper East Side New Yorkers."

"I like grit, I like love and death, I'm tired of irony. As we know from the Russians, a lot of good fiction is sentimental. I had this argument in Hollywood; I said, 'You guys out here in Glitzville don't realize that life is Dickensian.' Everywhere you look people are deeply totemistic without knowing it: they have their lucky objects and secret feelings from childhood. The trouble in New York is, urban novelists don't want to give people the dimensions they deserve.

"The novelist who refuses sentiment refuses the full spectrum of human behavior, and then he just dries up. Irony is always scratching your tired ass, whatever way you look at it. I would rather give full vent to all human loves and disappointments, and take a chance on beng corny, than die a smartass."