I was born in 1970, the first of seven children raised by my parents in Point Clear, Alabama. Now mostly a retreat for Mobileans, Point Clear was a remote stretch of low-lying coastline when I was a child. I spent my winters building tree forts, hunting, fishing and trapping in the swamp. Summers consisted of sleeping outside and fishing Mobile bay. We had few neighbors and learned early to entertain ourselves.

The expenses of seven children forced us to go without many luxuries. My four brothers and I shared a room with no air conditioning and spent muggy summer nights under ceiling fans. In winter, we kept warm with gas space heaters that burned until we crawled into our beds. Mom would come around and turn them off after we were asleep to save money and to take precautions against the house burning down.

Our small house was full of bunk beds and sleeping bags. We preferred the efficiency and portability of sleeping bags over sheets and blankets. Aside from the fact that many mattresses were bare, visitors usually thought it strange that no one had a bed that they considered their own. Everything in the Key household was on a first-come first-serve basis. When we had overnight company, they would often be left confused and alone in the dark waiting for someone to tell them where to sleep. However, there was always plenty of room. The only real concern was avoiding “the sponge,” the horrible smelling mattress my younger siblings slept on and wet. This was rotated constantly and spend-the-night company was sure to get it every time.

Books and stories were a large part of our childhood entertainment. Dad read Kipling and Poe and Doyle to us nightly. Mom saved a story she says is my first. I wrote it when I was ten and it is about a collie caught in a barbed-wire fence during a tornado. It is complete with a masking tape cover and gruesome pictures. It doesn't seem to be pulled from my imagination, but more like something a young Steven King would create.

I spent many nights telling my brothers stories about “Old Smelly,” a made-up character that stunk and exploded whenever he ate anything. The stories were silly but they made us all laugh.

My granddad was a Texas oil man. He passed when I was 14 and I only saw him a few times in my life. Despite his relative absence from our childhood, he had a very strong influence on us in an unusual way. He left some of his money to his grandchildren for education. It was just enough to send all of us to private prep school and college. This created a unique situation for my siblings and me. We were somewhat misplaced with people of greater monetary wealth. Sending us to private prep school, where we wore uniforms, saved my parents money on clothes. The oldest sister and I got new uniforms each year and they were passed down to the youngest. Our laundry room was one of the largest rooms in the house. An iron pipe was fastened the length of one entire wall and lined with uniforms in order of size. Beneath the pipe were five pot-luck laundry baskets of socks and underwear.

I was always small for my age, of fair complexion and toe-headed. When it came to girls, I was a late bloomer, preferring to be in the swamp or on the bay. Point Clear was remote enough that our time spent outside of school was not influenced by other children. Starting when I was 13, I spent my summers building wharves and sea walls for Mobileans. My winters were spent hunting and trapping in the swamp.

When I was 16, Dad left for Texas and returned with one of my granddad's old cars in tow. I had not expected to get an automobile and was overjoyed at the sight of a 20 year-old Oldsmobile.

I went to work immediately, fixing the engine, sanding and painting the exterior, and finally installing a radio with a cassette player. It would not quite meet the standards of my private school peers, but I no longer had to ride the bus. I had finally started concerning myself with girls and a sixteen year-old on the bus was a shameful experience.

After high-school I attended Birmingham-Southern College where I began to write seriously. It wasn't until I was in college and immersed in thousands of students that I began to notice how unsophisticated I was. The most obvious was my old sleeping bag that I hauled to Birmingham in a garbage bag. Despite my efforts to convince my roommate of its efficiencies, he and everyone else I noticed preferred sheets and comforters.

As unlikely as this sounds, I had never heard of paying to have a shirt pressed. I was fascinated with how stiff and wrinkle-free my roommate was able to iron his shirt. When I asked him about it, he told me about “the cleaners.” I didn't know men used the cleaners. This was the beginning of a long list of things that I've been learning and unlearning to this day.

By the time I graduated from college, I had finished two terrible novels that I thought were great. I returned to south Alabama and bought a little piece of land on a creek. I built a cabin and set myself up to be a hermetic novelist.

My dreams of being Thoreau were short-lived. After a year I met my wife, Katie, and we moved to the city. I was unsure about living in a place where I imagined sleepless nights of thumping car stereos and days of writing interrupted by neighbors bringing fruit cakes and such. However, I soon found that squirrels and birds lived in Mobile as well. There was even a possum that lived in a tree outside my window.

To alleviate the nag of my prejudices, I acquired a cheap piece of swampland 5 miles into the Alabama River delta that is only accessible by small boat. I took lumber collected from Point Clear after Hurricane George and barged it into the delta to build a “swamp” lodge. Now, I entertain myself and others in the swamp, catching alligators, running catfish lines, and generally “getting away from it all."

For those of you wondering, my home page is a picture of the swamp camp.

-Watt