c-span: jonathan yardley. >> guest: it was very interesting, actually. jonathan said that i was trying to basically coddle up to the black vernacular community by imitating this voice artificially, because it was not a voice that i owned, that i possessed. it was not a voice that was natural to me. but jonathan only knows me through books like "the signifying monkey" and op-ed page pieces in the post and the new york times and book reviews in the new yorker. i mean, i have different voices, and this isn't my voice when i'm with my friends and, as it were, with my people when i'm in piedmont, west virginia. and that's the voice that i try to replicate in this book. now i would love to be a writer -- again, from the time i saw james baldwin, i've wanted to be a writer. i think most critics, deep down, are frustrated writers or feel that they're failures as poets or novelists and i would really like to write novels sometime. c-span: do you write easily? >> guest: no. i mean, it's a lot of -- i write a first draft easily. c-span: where do you do it? >> guest