Melissa Fay Greene is the author of Last Man Out: The Story of the Springhill Mine Disaster, the compelling story of a group of men who spent nine days trapped inside a collapsed mine. Greene's first book, Praying for Sheetrock won the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award and was a National Book Award finalist and a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. Her second book, The Temple Bombing, also a National Book Award finalist, won the ACLU National Civil Liberties Award. Greene has written for numerous publications, among them The New Yorker, Newsweek, The New York Times, The Atlantic and Ms. She lives with her husband and children in Atlanta. Her website is: www.melissafaygreene.com

What drew you to the story of Last Man Out?

A mix of politics and esthetics drew me to the story. The acquaintance who first told me the story said, "Governor Griffin invited the survivors to recuperate on Jekyll Island, but the last man out was black." I was instantly captivated -- a black miner? Insulted by white supremacist Georgia Governor Marvin Griffin? When I learned the disaster had occurred in a Nova Scotia coal mine, my esthetic interest was piqued even more: if I understood correctly, a black man, an Afro-Canadian coal-miner, had been treated as an equal by his white comrades during the disaster, in the coal-black pure darkness of the pit; but, when rescued, and treated to a vacation on the sunniest spot on earth, whites saw him again as a Negro, a "mulatto," or worse, and he was segregated.

Black/white, darkness/light, inner light/inner darkness. Where men were blinded by darkness, they behaved as if Maurice Ruddick were their equal; where sunlight lit up the scene, they allowed race politics to isolate him. A friend of mine, who happens to be a federal judge, imagined what Griffin would have said: "Boy," he imagined him drawling, [pronouncing it "Bwa"], "Boy, you thought being in that PIT was bad..."

Your previous two books were about events during the upheaval of the post-Brown South, and this book takes place mostly in Canada -- could you talk about that?

And yet the coda for this book circles back to the post-Brown South! To be perfectly honest, I found myself roving further afield in search of a story in part because of the 1996 Olympics. The world, and its journalists, TV reporters, movie-makers, and novelists landed in Atlanta, seized upon Atlanta, told Atlanta stories, interviewed Atlanta characters, retold every Atlanta anecdote, and then decamped, leaving me in Atlanta surrounded by rocks already overturned. Easy for the media camp to move on to the next big thing; I LIVED in Atlanta, with the forlorn feeling that nothing new was left to tell. The Springhill Mine Disaster story, including Maurice Ruddick's part in it, is well-known in Canada; Ruddick is a household name in Canada; but the story and its heroes are not known in America and NO ONE TOLD THIS STORY DURING THE 1996 OLYMPICS.

In Praying for Sheetrock, you were present for some of the events. In The Temple Bombing and Last Man Out, you so accurately describe the culture of a time and place that you weren't present for. How do you do that? Are there different challenges in writing about something you were a part of versus something you were not present for?

The process of writing is the same: I write from the vivid images I see in my mind's eye. The difference is in the way those images are constructed. When I am an eye-witness, the images are first-hand impressions, the accuracy of which I do my best to preserve by on-the-scene note-taking and interviews, and later by retrospective note-taking and interviews of other witnesses. When writing stories about events outside my experience, I must build those mental images piece-by-piece, with every interview, news report, anecdote, and photograph contributing a bit to my understanding. I find, always, a few witnesses who strike me as most reliable and truth-telling, and I return and return to them while laying on layers and layers of detail. I fact-check with the men and women who witnessed the events, asking them, at every turn, "Is this right? was it like this?"

When the research is nearly done, when my chief witnesses are saying, "Yes! it was like that; yes, you've got it," I begin to write.

Your magazine articles usually are about current events, yet your books describe events 30 or 40 years ago -- Why are you drawn to the past for your longer projects? Is the research process different?

The magazine stories are like little vacations. I lay aside the book, the years of research and writing, for some number of days or weeks; I drive or fly somewhere; I meet someone with a story to tell and then I come home and write it up. The writing process is the same, requiring (1) a true mental image, (2) coffee, (3) fine-tip Expresso pens, and (4) yellow narrow-lined legal pads. A magazine story is fun because I can turn the whole thing around and see it in print in a matter of months rather than years, and I can satisfy my curiosity about corners of the world requiring article-length rather than book-length answers; for example, what is it like to live in a family with 19 children? Could I write a book about that? I don't know. But it made for a wonderfully diverting New York Times Magazine article.

Your books are all, in one way or another, about how racism impacts people's lives -- what draws you to that topic? You must have had to spend quite a bit of time interviewing racist people or reading racist literature -- how did that impact you?

A few years ago, I had the rare luck of visiting close friends in Warsaw in the months not long after the 1989 Revolution. Every night in my friends' living room, the intelligentsia of the new Poland -- the journalists and film-makers, the senators and even a couple of Cabinet-level officials -- gathered and, over wine and dark bread and pate, argued and hashed out the direction of their young democracy. I was there as a family friend, but the journalist Timothy Garton Ash showed up and threw himself into the fray. In Polish he shouted and argued alongside them, and waved his hands and participated as an equal in this watershed time, while I, the English-speaking family friend, consigned myself to clearing away the dirty dishes. Occasionally, out of the uproar, my friend would pull my sleeve and, in an attempt to include me, would say, "God -- they're talking about whether God should be in the Constitution" or "Abortion, whether to legalize abortion."

I went to bed that night regretting that I had organized my life differently than Timothy Garton Ash had organized his: why had I not, like him, learned Russian and Polish and who-knew-what other Eastern European languages, so that, with the fall of the Soviet empire, I could report from the front-lines about people reaching instinctively for freedom, men and women trying to invent democracy without ever having lived it.

But I woke up in the morning with the knowledge that that WAS what I was working on, that very subject, for I then was writing my first book, Praying For Sheetrock. The instinctive reaching of people beyond oppression towards freedom, the instinctive knowledge a man or woman carries that all human beings are created equal -- to me, that is the great story, the fundamental human story. Because I live in Georgia, the typical form that great story takes is the story of racism against African Americans and of civil rights. If I lived in Poland, that great story would be told in Polish, about Communism and about revolution.

You are often described as a Southern writer. What does that mean to you?

Well, I was born In Macon, Georgia, but I spent my accent-forming years in Ohio. For years after we moved to Ohio, my Southern cousins would say to me, when I visited, "Why, you talk just like a little Yankee now!" My sensibility and my education is not only Northern but Jewish. Am I a Southern writer? Am I a Jewish writer? Am I a woman writer? All those things, and yet I believe that it is only a failure of imagination that would pen me into those subjects as my only fair terrain. I deeply loved writing about Ethiopia for a recent New York Times Magazine article and may try to return there in some way for a future book project, despite the fact that I am not Ethiopian.

I do LOVE my fellow southern writers, however, an incredibly diverse and often hilarious bunch. Authors such as Terry Kay, Josephine Humphreys, John Egerton, Taylor Branch, Paul Hemphill, and Pat Conroy have all been very welcoming. I am honored to whatever extent they count me among their numbers.

What do you hope your readers will take away from reading your books?

I try to write the books out of a dual love for and commitment to history and to literature. (Sort of like being a double major in college. Of which I was one: History and English.) I try to write books which carry historical truth, yet also manage to capture, in the way of great literature, something of human nature, something of landscape, something of the quality of light, some true bit of LIFE. So I would be happy if readers found that my books to some extent inform them and entertain them and touch them.

You are one of the most eloquent writers of narrative nonfiction. What drew you to this style of chronicling events?

It is my love for poetry and literature, and my belief that it is likely the creative arts -- music, fiction, painting, drama, dance, and poetry -- which capture the truth of an era, no matter how many footnotes are assembled by reputable authorized historical tomes. I love nonfiction -- I love interviewing people and trying to replicate the rhythm and cadence and accent and myth-making in their voices, but I allow the gods of fiction -- character, place, and plot -- to influence my choice of stories.

What are some of your favorite books? Who do you respect as writers?

The writers I READ, on a regular basis, before sitting down to write in the morning, include: Homer, Chaucer, Robert Browning, and Saul Bellow. I also I read poetry, being especially fond of Robert Lowell, Stanley Kunitz, Seamus Heaney, Sharon Olds, Howard Nemerov, Wislawa Szymborska, and Langston Hughes.

As a mother of six with enormous responsibilities, how do you create the time/space to write?

Or you might ask it like this: "Given that you have six years of research and writing archived, not always with back-up, in your hard-drive, why are you allowing your three youngest children, and their friends, to play race-car games on it, pounding on your keyboard, while all eating popsicles?" Or you might ask it like close friends ask, whenever we mention that we're adding another child, by birth or by adoption: "Are you NUTS??!!"

The short answer is: I write while they're in school. The moment the last one is out the door in the morning, I race to my home-office and work. When they start trooping in after school, my work day is over. In fairness to the children, I will add that I couldn't write all day anyway. And the fact that I'm relentlessly interrupted and pulled away from my desk means that I have few bouts of 'writer's block.' The writing invariably feels like something I'm desperately trying to rush back to, rather than something to which I'm shackled.