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Ben Fountain |  Wednesday, June 10, 6:30 p.m. | Quail Ridge Books, Raleigh

I’d thought departing Durham at 8 would allow plenty of time to get to New Bern for an 11 a.m. interview with author Ben Fountain. But, of course, there is traffic on Highway 147 and Interstate 40, and it took more than an hour to get east of Raleigh, a 20-minute midnight drive. Have humans always measured distance with intervals of time? How can we know how far we’ve come unless we know how long it took to get here? 

Fountain, 67, was born in Eastern North Carolina, spent his formative years in the Triangle, and has called both home ever since. His debut collection of short stories, Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, was published to widespread acclaim in 2006.

Three more books followed, including the novel Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and was adapted into a movie directed by Ang Lee. His latest novel, political satire Rasputin Swims the Potomac, centers on a world champion professional wrestler with presidential ambitions. It releases in June. 

Highways 42 and 70 take me into the Sandhills on my way to meet Fountain, and I imagine him as a 13-year-old boy traversing this route in reverse, on his way from Kinston to a new life in Cary. 

 “When I was growing up in North Carolina in the ’60s, there was dire poverty out in the countryside—I mean, tar-paper shacks and naked kids in the yard,” Fountain told me. “And if we aren’t careful, we’ll go right back to it.”

Fountain’s family made the move in the early ’70s after his father was elected to serve as president of the state’s community college system—the third largest in the nation—which thrived under governors like Terry Sanford.

“If you asked my dad what he did,” Fountain said, “he would say he was a school man. If you pushed him further, he would say he was trying to help poor people.”

After graduating from Cary High School, Fountain attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he majored in English and took classes from the likes of Doris Betts and Marianne Gingher. He then went on to Duke Law School, where he fell in love with Sharrie—his future wife—whom he would follow to Dallas, Texas, thereby escaping what he described, in a 2006 New York Times essay, as “the cumulative weight of family and history and place, a kind of endlessly repeating nostalgic fog.” 

Fountain’s quitting his lucrative lawyering job five years later to become a writer—and the long, slogging road to success that culminated in the publication of his lauded debut collection of stories at age 48—has been well documented in Malcolm Gladwell’s famous essay “Late Bloomers” and repeated in almost every article about Fountain since. 

“I went to law school,” Fountain explained, “because I was scared of writing.” There was no clear-cut path to the creative…