Smoke veils the air like souls in drifting suspension, declining the war's insistence everyone move on.

As before, there is a great silence, with no end in sight. The writer surrenders, listening.

I write line by line, by the sound and the weight and the music of the words.

The writer's first affinity is not to a loyalty, a tradition, a morality, a religion, but to life itself, and to its representation in language.

Smoke veils the air like souls in drifting suspension, declining the war's insistence everyone move on.

Literature can teach us how to live before we live, and how to die before we die. I believe that writing is practice for death, and for every (other) transformation human beings encounter.

Towns change; they grow or diminish, but hometowns remain as we left them.