Anything A Man Can Do, I Can

All My Characters Exist In Risk, In The Places We Are Either Too Afraid To Go To, Or Have Enough Privilege Not To Have To, But Whatever The Reason, These Characters I Fashion Go Before Us And Come Back Transformed For Us. For Me, At Least.

The Internet Is Really Our Meeting Place. We Have This Amazing Listserv. Every Time I Log Onto It I Feel A Sense Of Pride, Because If You Log On And Say, "oh I Was Just In San Diego And I Was In A Park And I Saw A Lion," The Flurry Of Replies On Average Is Just Like--wow! All These Existential Questions About What It Means To Be An African, And Never Having Seen A Lion At Home, But Having Seen A Lion Here. Everything You Say Turns Into This Real Philosophical Debate--it's Incredible In So Many Ways. And It's An Invigorating Place To Be.

The Privilege Of Being A Writer Is That You Have This Opportunity To Slow Down And To Consider Things.

The Greatest Thing About Form And Convention Is That It Saves You From Having To Reinvent The Wheel. Now, Whether You Mount The Wheel To A Horse Carriage Or A Formula One Racing Car, Make It Plain Or Give It Spinning Rims, Those Are All Craft Decisions. But The Fact Of The Wheel Remains: It Will Turn If You Set It Down. That's What I Mean About The Beauty Of The Gifts Genre Can Offer.

I Think That Those Of Us Who Are Ordinary Disappear Easily Into The Backdrop Of Life And We Take Things For Granted. We Often Wake Up In Our Lives And Wonder How We Got There. But The Characters I Create, The People I Am Drawn To, Are Quite Extraordinary (and Not Always In Wholesome Ways), And They Offer Us The Chance To Understand Who We Really Are And How We Became Who We Are.