When Men Talk About The Agony Of

To Describe Our Growing Up In The Lowcountry Of South Carolina, I Would Have To Take You To The Marsh On A Spring Day, Flush The Great Blue Heron From Its Silent Occupation, Scatter Marsh Hens As We Sink To Our Knees In Mud, Open An Oyster With A Pocketknife And Feed It To You From The Shell And Say, 'there. That Taste. That's The Taste Of My Childhood.'

American Men Are Allotted Just As Many Tears As American Women. But Because We Are Forbidden To Shed Them, We Die Long Before Women Do, With Our Hearts Exploding Or Our Blood Pressure Rising Or Our Livers Eaten Away By Alcohol Because That Lake Of Grief Inside Us Has No Outlet. We, Men, Die Because Our Faces Were Not Watered Enough.

Basketball Allowed Me To Revere My Father Without Him Knowing What I Was Up To. I Took Up Basketball As A Form Of Homage And Mimicry.

What's Important Is That A Story Changes Every Time You Say It Out Loud. When You Put It On Paper, It Can Never Change. But The More Times You Tell It, The More Changes Will Occur. A Story Is A Living Thing; It Moves And Shifts

I Prayed Hard And Only Gradually Became Aware That This Fierce Praying Was A Way Of Finding Prologue And Entrance Into My Own Writing. This Came As Both Astonishment And Relief. When I Thought God Had Abandoned Me, I Discovered That He Had Simply Given Me A Different Voice To Praise The Inexhaustible Beauty Of The Made World.