Raised in a small town in Connecticut by his certifiable “numero” mom, educated in the cornfields of Iowa, ‘doctorized’ in Texas (PH.D from University of Houston,) been a tireless supporter of environmental causes and an educator. He currently lectures at the American University in Paris.

The delightful French Spirits celebrates the confluence of love (Mary) and property (vacant presbytery in Bourgogne.) And in The Golden-Bristled Boar: The Last Ferocious Beast of the Forest explores the mythology and culinary pleasures of wild boar.

We met over coffee in Paris at Le Raspail on market day.

When did you first come to Paris?

1973, Paris was a swirling hallucination after I arrived with food poisoning.  My grandmother made me lunch in NYC before I boarded the plane.  She was such a bad cook that she could cut a tomato and it would be a health hazard.  I can’t say whether I stayed on the left bank or the right; I hardly left the hotel.  But I never forgot how the light stretched late into the evening and the café odors and sounds rose to my window.  The ugly wallpaper had its unique charm (though Oscar Wilde would think differently), and the winding wooden staircase was an indigenous Paris being.  Despite my infirmary, Paris sensations and impressions became deeply engrained in me from my first visit.

When and why did you come back to stay?

While I was finishing my Ph.D. in 1986, my mother phoned, beside herself with excitement.  She had just received an invitation to do a yearlong sabbatical at the Pasteur Institute.  She said, “Why don’t you come?  You could spend the time writing.”  It didn’t take long for me to decide between teaching composition in a remote part of the US or spending a year writing in Paris.  I never dreamed that I would marry my mother’s boss and make Paris my home.  Many of these experiences wound up in my memoir French Spirits in part because my mother and wife are principal characters.

Where do you live ?

I live in the 6eme arrondissement, a block from both the Bon Marché and the Lutetia Hotel.  The 6eme is the home of the Odeon Theater, the Academy of Sciences, Saint Germain Abbey, Saint Sulpice Church, the Medici Palace, Luxembourg Gardens, and numerous publishing houses.  The cafés are famous for their literary legacies.   Like most Parisians, we like to brag about our commerçants—green grocer, fishmonger, cheese shop, and butcher.  We have one of the best butchers in Paris in Monsieur Bajon on the rue de l’Abbe Gregoire.  He is by turns theatric and deeply serious; sometimes in movies, other times teaching at Paris’s prestigious culinary schools.  I devote a chapter to his advice and expertise in my latest book The Golden Bristled Boar: Last Ferocious Beast of the Forest.

Why did you choose to live there?

A year before I met my wife, she bought the apartment practically the moment she saw it.  It was within walking distance of the Pasteur Institute while being located in central Paris.   The apartment is perfect for us, since it is very quiet and it gets light from two inner courtyards.  It isn’t large, but it does have two nice bedrooms, one of which I use for a study.  I have written most of my books in that room.

What’s your favorite café?

Café de la Mairie on the place St. Sulpice.  It’s very close to Odile Hellier’s great bookstore The Village Voice, and I often go to this café with my writer friends.

What’s your favorite starred restaurant?

My favorite starred restaurant in Lameloise.  It is not Paris, but in the great vineyard region of Burgundy.  We had known the family for over 25 years.  It is intimate, elegant, and unpretentious.  And we get great intelligence on local wine producers.  I couldn’t help describing this restaurant in French Spirits because it contributed to our falling in love with Burgundy and eventual finding an old house to restore in the region.

What’s your favorite bistro du coin?

I greatly enjoy Le Nemrod, mainly because it is two steps from our apartment, the salads and salmon tartare are great, and it is lively and pleasant.  Le Nemrod has saved us on a number of occasions when we’ve returned to Paris with nothing in the refrigerator.

What’s your favorite market?

We are blessed with the high-quality Blvd. Raspail markets on Tuesdays, Fridays, and Sundays.   In particular, I frequent the weekday markets and on Fridays I almost always buy fish bring to our country place–beautiful sea bass, dorade, sole, langostines, palourds, crab claws (four poissonneries!).  My mother always prepares a special Friday feast in the country.

What’s your favorite park or garden?

This is hardly going to sound original, but I have to be honest–I love the Luxembourg Gardens.  I was asked the same question for a Japanese Airline magazine article on expat writers in Paris.  Luxembourg Gardens is the place I wanted to be photographed.  The park has everything: an art museum, the Medici Palace, fountains, music gazebo, flowering trees, a children’s theatre, ponies for children, boules, tennis, and basketball courts, fruit espalier orchards, flower beds, sculptures of writers, and even a summer outdoor opera.

What’s your favorite time of the year?

All seasons are wonderful, but in the spring the light comes back, sometimes gaining three or for minutes a day.  Spring begins at the end of February and by the end of March the city is already in bloom.  The French begin shedding their heavy black clothes, and on a good sunny day it seems as if the city rejoices together.  The women, always stylish in my neighborhood (our apartment is next to Cristobal Balenciaga), try out new spring/summer clothes and appear joyous.

Talk about the genesis of French Spirits, The Golden-Bristled Boar, and your life in Burgundy.

My wife, Mary, and I on a pure quixotic whim bought an old presbytery in Colette’s region of Burgundy known as La Puisaye.  The presbytery had been deserted for fifteen years, the last resident have been a very poor, wine-loving curé, who was adored in the village of 750 inhabitants.  The Briare canal, built by Henry IV in 1604 to link the Seine and the Loire Rivers, runs through our village as does the Loing River.  I plunged into work restoring the old prerevolutionary building and found the place, the people, and the history complex and textured.  Amid our trials and tribulations, Mary and I decided to get married and have a country picnic at the construction site as the celebration.  My mother came over with friends and family members and fell in love with the house.  In a kind of Trojan horse scheme that even fooled her, my mother retired from Yale and ended up moving into our house and becoming one of the village characters.  Just for the fun of it, I started writing what I thought would be an anti-Peter Mayle book.  I wanted to capture the real sense of people and place and not just caricatures.  I wanted to honor people, and not make fun of them.  This was French Spirits.  I never imagined the book would be published in a number of countries and people would make pilgrimages to visit us.

I have often been asked to write a sequel to French Spirits.  But instead I wrote a book on habitat restoration, protection of endangered species, and environmental education.  This book was Water From Stone.  While writing this nature book, a neighbor in Burgundy gave me an odd gift.  He dropped a black plastic sack resembling a body bag in my lap.  It was half of an unbutchered wild boar.  The French in the country are very generous, always leaving gifts, often anonymously, but this time I was confronted with the task of butchering an animal I knew nothing about.  But as I worked through the anatomy of the boar and dreamed of meals we would have, I marveled at its powerful structure.  I would soon learn that the wild boar was becoming the number one animal outlaw in the world.  We happened to live in one of the most boar populated areas in Europe.  I wanted to go out in the woods and see them, and I began questioning hunters, butchers, veterinarians, cookbook writers, chefs, artists, and forestry professors about boars.   The subject led me on a journey of discovery in France, Italy, Spain, the UK, and the American South.  The journey became the book The Golden Bristled Boar: Last Ferocious Beast of the Forest, published so far in the States and the UK, and has elicited feature film interest.

How has Paris affected your work?

Paris (and France in general) has become central to my subject matter, whether I am writing for a feature film or a short story, a poem or a memoir.  Probably because I am an outsider, I can see wonders in what a French person would take for granted, even dismiss as dull.  Every corner of Paris is storied, layer upon layer of events have transpired or villains and great artists have passed their lives there.  It is hard not to learn something entirely new each day, and as a writer I find my life here richly inspiring.

How has Paris affected your life?

When I was young, I never imagined that I would make a life in France.  It was tough professionally at first because I was very driven to have a university career in the late 1980s and there were no jobs for a professor of creative writing and literature working in English.  For more than a decade, I had to commute to a tenured position in the States, and I was torn between the two places.  I could have supported a small family on my phone bills alone.  After I began writing nonfiction, I decided that I could write books and look for short-term teaching positions, whatever came up, although it was a painful to give up regular academic life.  Sometimes, one has to take big risks.  It turns out committing myself to a life in Paris was one of my best decisions.  With today’s communications, I’m easily in touch with editors, publicists, and my agent.  Thanks to my published works mainly set in France, I now have a creative writing teaching position at the American University of Paris, where I enjoy working with exceptional colleagues.