Behind My Carefully Buttoned Collar Is My

Write The Story That You Were Always Afraid To Tell. I Swear To You That There Is Magic In It, And If You Show Yourself Naked For Me, I'll Be Naked For You. It Will Be Our Covenant.

I Fell Into Shame Like A Suicide Throws Herself Into A River. (253)

Why Write Stories? To Join The Conversation.

Beauty Is A Hard Thing. Beauty Is A Mean Story. Beauty Is Slender Girls Who Die Young, Fine-featured Delicate Creatures About Whom Men Write Poems. Beauty, My First Girlfriend Said To Me, Is That Inner Quality Often Associated With Great Amounts Of Leisure Time. And I Loved Her For That.

I Want Hard Stories, I Demand Them From Myself. Hard Stories Are Worth The Difficulty. It Seems To Me The Only Way I Have Forgiven Anything, Understood Anything, Is Through That Process Of Opening Up To My Own Terror And Pain And Reexamining It, Re-creating It In The Story, And Making It Something Different, Making It Meaningful - Even If The Meaning Is Only In The Act Of The Telling.