Lewis Nordan is famous for his special vision of the Mississippi Delta. His characters, for whom the closest-though hopelessly inadequate-description might be "eccentrics," share the stage with swamp elves and midgets living in the backyard. His fiction is unlike anybody else's and is as dark, hilarious, and affecting as any ever written. It's also writing that lays bare the agony of adolescence and plows, as the Cleveland Plain Dealer once put it, "the fields of puzzling wonder that precede the responsibilities and disappointments of adulthood." What bred and fed Nordan's imagination, his originality, his indefatigable sense of humor? The answers aren't obvious. But now that Lewis Nordan produces, directs, and stars in his own story, we just might find out. Nordan's mother was widowed when he was a baby, and she went back to her home town to remarry and raise her only son "Buddy." Itta Bena, Mississippi, was a prototypical fifties Delta town, so drowsy that even before puberty, Nordan had made his escape plans. What happened next was pretty typical-a stint in the Navy, college in Mississippi, very early marriage, young fatherhood, alcoholism, infidelities, broken hearts. But in Nordan's hands, the typical turns into the transcendent and, at the heart of things, there is always the irrepressible laughter. Horrible things and horribly funny things happen in Boy with Loaded Gun, but it's that heart that leads us through Lewis Nordan's dark tunnel and back into the light. Lewis Nordan was a professor of creative writing at the University of Pittsburgh for many years and the author of seven books of fiction and a memoir. His awards include three American Library Association Notable Book citations, the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for fiction, the Mississippi Authors Award for fiction, and the Southern Book Critics Award for fiction. He died in 2012. Zen and the Art of Mail Order Sometime after school started in the fall of that year, I began to order things from mail-order catalogs. Montgomery Ward was my favorite, and my first order was a gift for my parents. Somewhere near the middle of the catalog I found the order sheet, which I ripped jaggedly out, and I began to fill it out in pencil in my pathetically childish hand. I carefully spelled out the letters of my name on the top line of the form, only to discover that I had failed to follow directions and should have noted "last name first" in the first blank. Laboriously I erased and, in the smudged space that resulted, began again. Name, address, telephone, name of item, item number, size, color, price, and so on. For the first time I felt in communication with an exterior geography, almost another world. That was the point of this exercise, far more than the gift that was its immediate object. After the long night in Shiloh's, after falling in love with my father's midget, the city limits of Itta Bena began to seem a prison to me. I was not ready for my escape, but for the first time I could see beyond the walls. Would Ward's even send me what I ordered? Would my money disappear into the ether? I was not sure. I was not at all confident my message would reach its destination, any more than are those scientists who send out signals to the stars in hopes of contacting extraterrestrial life. They are not surprised or disappointed on a daily basis at the silence of their stars, nor would I be. My task was made more difficult, though not less thrilling, by the fact that I had hidden myself in the clothes closet of my room, among the must of rubber boots and malodorous shoes and wool clothing on hangers. I don't know why the secrecy of this act was important to me. To have anyone suspect that I was so presumptuous as to believe I could actually make contact with the outside world-well, I had to hide, I couldn't face anyone with such a presumption. There was no light in the closet, so along with my pencil and the catalog I took a f

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