Amazon.com: Where are you from? How if at all has your sense of place colored your writing?

D.B.: I am from Montana. That is I was born and raised here. However, that Montana no longer exists. Those who come here looking for something 'different' from the rest of America, are 20 years too late. Television was not around in my youth. Now everyone in Montana thinks just like the rest of America because they all listen to the same experts on TV and watch the same commmercials. Drink the same drinks, wear the same clothes, eat the same food, think whatever they are told to think...in sound bites. It wasn't always thus. I weep for what once was and can never be again because we are all, as a nation, asleep in front of our glowing screens. When I grew up a person without an opinion was a person without character. You were EXPECTED to think for yourself and have your OWN thoughts about life. Now you are considered 'judgemental', if you have an 'opinion' that is contrary to popular thought, i.e. what the 'experts' tell us we should think, eat, wear. We call it being politically co!rrect, but it goes much deeper than that. Consequently, whatever I write is inescapably full of my own thoughts, opinions and free of the brainwashing undergone by my baby booming contemporaries. My books have been quite unpopular with the intellecutal elite, experts, professionals, but tends to find great favor (still) with the poor few who have escaped the brain washing.

Amazon.com: When and why did you begin writing? When did you first consider yourself a writer?

D.B.: The short answer is, 'If you write one book, you wrote a book. If you write two books, you're a writer." So I gues that makes me a writer. I was tricked into writing my first book. I'd never given writing a second thought as a profession. Of course I never gave anything a second thought as a profession. And have done quite well. I always loved putting words to paper. Expressing myself through the written word. I don't know how I do it, never studied how to do it, but put a blank paper in front of me and leave me alone and I can tell you a story, or express, at least, an opinion that will provoke reaction. In this age of tv/video/movies...we are very much a visual people and soon words will be obsolete. Was a time when a book could topple a government. Ask Voltaire. Victor Hugo. Even Shakespeare caused turmoil. Now it's just to provide material for Movies of the Week; or Movies, or Beach reading. It's been decades since a really dangerous book has been written. I hope to write !one before I die. I have come close with Kamikaze Cowboy. It has been banned, burned and murdered in house, so I'm on the right track. You cannot attack the powers that be. The publishing houses are all controlled by the same corporations that control movies, etc. So any book that doesn't feed the corporate monster is not published. Of course "serious" writers still write "literature" but it is only read by other writers at writer's conferences attended by a bunch of intellectuals. Voltaire was read by the MASSES. Beaudelaire likewise. Henry Miller was maybe last American writer to cause a hubub. It is a very scary time we live in. Any one who wants to write a really "important" book would have to publish it himself and drive around the country selling it. And hire bodyguards. I have been threatened for my book. I started writing at age 39. I have written screenplays. Stageplays. Two books published. But I have always been reluctant to call myself a writer. Or define what I am by what I do. I act. I write. I direct. I lecture. I cook. I chop wood. And people have paid me money to do all of these things, so I guess I am a professional at all of them. I do find, it confuses people a great deal if you do too many things. We live in a time when your are nothing if you aren't an expert.

Amazon.com: Who or what has influenced your writing, and in what way? What books have most influenced your life?

D.B.: Never watching television as a child, nor as an adult for that matter, has left me with my own opinions, thoughts about things which has made all the difference. I am my own expert.West With The Night by Bery Markham is the best written book I've ever read. (All things considered) Heminway said about it in a letter to Max Perkins..."it makes the rest of us look like carpenters". I couldn't agree more. I never read novels, with the exception of Patrick O'brien to whom I am addicted. If you've read him you understand, if you haven't, then you haven't lived.Voltaire's Bastards is my favorite book.George Ohsawa is the writer who most influenced, indeed saved, my life.My favorite writer is William Dufty. Read "Swanson on Swanson", which, like many of 'his' books, he ghost wrote.

Amazon.com: What is the most romantic book you've ever read? The scariest? The funniest?

D.B.: Romantic...Confessions of a Kamikaze Cowboy, Scariest...Confessons of a Kamikaze Cowboy, Funniest...Confessions of a Kamikaze Cowboy

Amazon.com: What music, if any, most inspires you to write? What do you like to listen to while writing?

D.B.: I can not imagine listening to music while I write. Writing IS music. People who listen to music while writing, write from the brain, not the soul or heart. They are intellectuals. Clever, smart, sophisticated, but they can never go beyond themselves, I should say, beyond their Selves, as writers. In other words, God never steps in. They are safe. Non threatening. And of course do wonderful interviews and make scads of money. I would be one if I knew how.

Amazon.com: What are you reading now? What CD is currently in your stereo?

D.B.: I am preparing to direct my first film, from my own screenplay, CAHOOTS. I am writing, answering your questions right now, so there is no CD playing. I listen to music every morning while cooking breakfast for my two boys and myself. We listen to everything....In Sync, Dwight Yoakum, Beattles, Chopin, Mozart, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Big Band, Dixieland, Manhattan Transfer, Sara Vaughn. EVERYTHING. (But Rap, which is not music. Really.) But had I to choose, one music that is my favorite, that I could listen to all my life at the exclusion of everything else, it would be J.S.Bach. He is the Shakespeare of music and from whence it all derived. They have yet to discover a chord progression Bach didn't write. Give me Bach, Shakespeare, MacCallans and a Flor de Allones and I want for nothing.

Amazon.com: What are you working on?

D.B.: I have a stage play that will be produced this Fall in Dallas. Acting Becomes Her. I have finished a rewrite.I am half way through my third, and final, autobiographical book.."Dig Deep, Puppy in Bottom...Notes from a Dangerous Wordsmith."I don't meant to brag, but this could be the book that'll put a price on my head.

Amazon.com: Use this space to write about whatever you wish.

D.B.: I am a single Dad. Raising two boys. And about that I have this to say...There is a divine moment in our lives when we all become One.It is called procreation and it is reborn, continually and forever, in the future we call children.They are our legacy. Our responsibility. They are our destiny and we are theirs.The extent to which we fail as parents, we fail as God's children.

The End