Michael was a very talented writer. But he also had some pretty nasty demons. He and I were born about the same time down in Iowa. He lived in a small corner of SE Iowa which happened to be the last part of the state that the DNR opened to pheasant hunting. I remember him writing about how they had to head north to go pheasant hunting. I grew up in Waterloo. All we had to do was make sure we were outside the city limits.