It's OK just to be a writer, who writes about the society in which he lives and the issues that most important. Now how can that not be a writer, it always was. It's just recently that writers have been reduced to these playthings of the market.

What came for them? Not death. Just the end of living.

He folded his fear into a perfect rose. He held it out in the palm of his hand. She took it from him and put it in her hair.

They would grow up grappling with ways of living with what happened. They would try to tell themselves that in terms of geological time it was an insignificant event. Just a blink of the Earth Woman's eye. That Worse Things had happened. That Worse Things kept happening. But they would find no comfort in the thought.

Her grief grieved her. His devastated her.

The writer is the midwife of understanding.

When people say "the people" or "the public" as though it's the final repository of all morality, I sometimes flinch.