Pamela: Hi, my name is Pamela Porter, and I'm the author of The Crazy Man. I am going to tell you a little bit about how I came to write The Crazy Man, and then I'm going to read you a section.

Every summer, my family goes out to Saskatchewan, because that's where the family farm is. And when my children were little, they didn't want to be out in the wheat fields all day long, so I would be in town with them in Weyburn, Saskatchewan. And we'd do different things, like go to the animal shelter and go to the sandwich shop for lunch. One time we looked around at the big old mental hospital that was empty, but at one time had more than 2,000 patients in it, right outside of a town of 8,000 people. And I began to wonder, if we looked in the windows of that spooky old building, who used to be a patient there, and what it was like, and what it was like. And what it was like living near that mental hospital, if you were a child and lived right next to it?

So as we were driving home from British Columbia, it took three days to drive home. And in that time, Angus and Emily, and her mom and dad, and Harry Record all jumped into my mind and began to act out the things they were acting out. And when I got home, I started to write the story of The Crazy Man. Here's a little part of it:

Emily says: I was deep in my own brain, sitting in that restive chair, when mom called out the window, "Anne come get your dinner." And I came outside of myself to notice it was quiet. The tractor was still. And the tractor man was sitting on the back step, eating off one of our plates. I couldn't decide if I should go to the trouble to hobble all the way around to the front porch to avoid him. Or if I should try to just slide past him there on the back step. Mom called again, looking down out of the window over the sink. So I started toward the back step. I got closer to the crazy man. My hands gripped hard on the handles of my crutches. My good foot landed in front of the step where he sat, eating off our blue plate with a chip on one side. All of a sudden, he put his plate down on the ground, and he bent over and tied up my shoelace. Then he picked the plate up again.

Before I got all the way to the door, he said, "Tell your momma Angus says she cooks real good."