I spent most of my 20s with these alligator wrestlers in the swamps of South Florida.

It remains unbelievable to me that I have any readers beyond my own blood relations - it's a crazy, wild gift.

Sometimes it can feel like the whole globe is spinning with irredeemable losses, capricious natural disasters and crimes so outrageously evil they dismantle any attempt to solve or explain them.

Heaven, Kiwi thought, would be the reading room of a great library. But it would be private. Cozy. You wouldn't have to worry about some squeaky-shoed librarian turning the lights off on you or gauging your literacy by reading the names on your book spines, and there wouldn't be a single other patron. The whole place would hum with a library's peace, filtering softly over you like white bars of light.

Regret is a pilgrimage back to the place where I was free to choose.

At the end of the block where I used to live in Coconut Grove in Miami, there's a swampy area, a no-name alcove with a little mangrove estuary. It's beautiful.

What passes for news is just morbid speculation or cartoonish screaming, followed by diaper commercials.