Women lose their lives not knowing they can do something different. Men eat themselves up believing they have to be the thing they have been made. Children go crazy. Really, even children go crazy, believing the shape of the life they must live is as small and mean and broken as they are told.

Life ain't the movies.

I claimed myself and remade my life.

Beauty, my first girlfriend said to me, is that inner quality often associated with great amounts of leisure time.

And of course these days I feel like there is a nation of us - displaced southerners and children of the working class. We listen to Steve Earle, Mary J. Blige, and k.d. lang. We devour paperback novels and tell evil mean stories, value stubbornness above patience and a sense of humor more than a college education. We claim our heritage with a full appreciation of how often it has been disdained. And let me promise you, you do not want to make us angry.

I need you to do more than survive. As writers, as revolutionaries, tell the truth, your truth in your own way.

Twenty years after we had left so fierce and proud, we were all right back where we had started, yoked to each other and the same old drama.