My family didn't go to church. Once when I slept over at the house of a friend, her parents brought me to Sunday school with her. I was given this little pamphlet of tiny poems about the natural world, about butterflies and sunsets. My 7-year-old self was so astounded by how these few words were creating pictures and feelings in me.

In my perception, the world wasn't a graph or formula or an equation. It was a story.

Writing is hard for every last one of us—straight white men included. Coal mining is harder. Do you think miners stand around all day talking about how hard it is to mine for coal? They do not. They simply dig.

I was a pebble. I was a leaf. I was the jagged branch of a tree. I was nothing to them and they were everything to me.

I'd finally come to understand what it had been: a yearning for a way out, when actually what I had wanted to find was a way in.

I was trying to find a new home in the world.

All of us, as we mature and grow up - if we're doing life right - we evolve.