Pretend that this is a time of miracles and we believe in them.

When I meet people for the first time, I always put on my glasses because I feel like that's a little something extra between me and them. It's like the Laurence Dunbar poem "We Wear the Mask."

In terms of the idea of long-term occupation - I have been reading a little bit more about this period - and you can see in that occupation are many lessons for the current occupation of Iraq. So we have these connections that go way back that people aren't aware of.

We still have our people working in the cane fields in the Dominican Republic. People are still repatriated all the time from the Dominican Republic to Haiti. Some tell of being taken off buses because they looked Haitian, and their families have been in the Dominican Republic for generations. Haitian children born in the Dominican Republic still can't go to school and are forced to work in the sugarcane fields.

When you write ,it's like braiding your hair. Taking a handful of coarse unruly strands and attempting to bring then unity.

Whole interaction between the storyteller and the listeners had a very powerful influence on me.

I think novels just really show us the deepest parts of people's hearts, and you cannot walk away anymore and say, "I don't know."