Author Susan Straight says that the inspiration and the way she rights has a lot to do with the place she calls home.

Every one of author Susan Straight's 10 books refer to the place she calls home. Like William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston and Thomas Wolfe, Straight, owing to her fantastic works, has made her hometown literary history.

"I still live in the same place I've lived all my life. And even though I look like this, most of the characters [in my books] are black or mixed race, because that's the community I live in," the author told Kirkus Reviews.

Straight's latest novel in a trilogy, "Between Heaven and Here"  is a story told to her by an elderly family friend decades ago. Straight says it's the story he told her about how "he almost starved when he was a small child growing up near a Florida turpentine forest"

"I was so hungry, and I was so angry about it, that one day, I knew where there was a pig in the woods. And I got a hammer and I walked three miles to where that pig was, and I killed it with my hammer. And I dragged it back home, and put it in the yard, and I told my mother, and I said 'I'm tired of being hungry. I want you to cook me some meat.' "

Now whenever Straight teaches creative writing students at the University of California, Riverside, she always gives them this advice:

"The best thing I could say is, you do have to be a really good listener. If I go to a family reunion and there's 400 people there, everybody comes up to tell me their story, right? And I think when you're a good listener, then you can imagine how someone's talking - dialogue is your key friend, is it not?"