stories are the one sure way I know to touch the heart and change the world.

Babies change things, open doors you thought were shut, close others. Make you into something you never been.

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.

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.

The bottom line is I'm writing to save the dead. I'm writing to save the people I have lost, some of whose bodies are still walking around.

It ain't that you get religion. Religion gets you and then milks you dry. Won't let you drink a little whiskey. Won't let you make no fat-assed girls grin and giggle. Won't let you do a damn thing except work for what you'll get in the hearafter. I live in the here and now.