Goodreads asked Sandy McIntosh:

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

Sandy McIntosh My most recent book is Lesser Lights: More Tales from a Hamptons' Apprenticeship. When I was twelve years old, I was sent up the Hudson River to the New York Military Academy. I was there for six years. Instead of the military life that I abhorred, I spent much of my sentence in the library reading—reading anything odd, arcane, and outside the limited glimpses of literature that a military school curriculum allowed. In short, I hid myself in the darkest, most remote of intellectual caves for those years. In an alien world, my aim was to educate myself as a poet, to survive.

To my great good fortune, after graduation, I found myself enrolled at Southampton College, in Eastern Long Island. Like every college, Southampton looked to form a pool of part-time professors who lived locally to supplement the smaller full-time staff. But, unlike most every college in the country, Southampton was able to hire the local artists and writers, who—the Hamptons being the Hamptons—were often the best in the world. For instance, Willem de Kooning lectured on elementary painting. Ilya Bolotowky, the neo-plasticist painter, with his huge mustache and thick Russian accent, taught my Freshman English class. The Bollingen-prize poet David Ignatow taught creative writing, as did the poet, playwright and translator, H. R. Hays. I had encounters with writers such as Truman Capote and Norman Mailer. During those college years and for decades after, I was privileged to apprentice with many of them. I was not only their student, but their chauffeur, gardener, even informal psychologist, and their friend. My two memoirs, A Hole in the Ocean: A Hamptons’ Apprenticeship, and the newly published Lesser Lights: More Tales from a Hamptons’ Apprenticeship tell their stories and my own.

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