Marjorie Gubelmann

I don't think people should be fed mesclun salad and chicken breast. My grandmother would serve grits and oxtail stew at a formal dinner, and if you didn't like it, well then you ate more beans or you went home and ate a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

I'd worked at a small town newspaper, and I was thinking of all the strange stories that I had seen float through the newsroom in my time there that were dismissed as kind of amusing curiosities. Somehow from that I got to this idea of an eccentric alcoholic who built a lighthouse in the woods.