Poe Ballantine

I have learned that I am not built for conflict or controversy. I have also learned that, in all my life, I have never chosen a story. The story has always chosen me.

I'm that sensitive, honest guy who likes people, wants to know why, and who puzzles everyone by continually putting himself in harm's way.

Western Nebraska is the only place in all my travels where I have seen the dust blowing and the rain falling at the same time.

Love and Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere' took me six years to write.

All my life, I never realized you could have a conversation with a ghost.

Because I've lived a risky and unconventional life, I don't often struggle for subjects to write about.

I'm compared to Kerouac, I suppose, because he traveled and rejected middle-class values, but the similarities end there.

There's good money in true crime, I'm told, and plenty of it lying around, but it's a devil of an art form.

I studied a truckload of true crime, praying for illumination, but most true crime relies on luridness and voyeurism for effect.