Perhaps it is our fear, that in the silence between stories, in the moment of falling, the fear that we will never find the one story which will save us, and so we lunge for another, and we feel safe again, if only for as long as we are telling it.

The first book I could call mine, my first book, was a picture book, The Magic Monkey - it was adapted from an old Chinese legend by a thirteen-year-old prodigy named Plato Chan with the help of his sister.

If you're going to write about someone's life, you don't just use them for wallpaper. You have to honor and respect that life.

I became an electrician after high school. But I always had this thing in me to write. But it was always a little shameful. To say you were a poet was saying you were kind of crazy, and I carried that around for a long time. I still kind of carry that. And I think it might be true, actually.

Trinity Park lies directly across from the library, Trinity Church rising like a midieval thought amidst the glass and steel towers.

Change is one of the only constants in Buddhism; as meditation became the way I breathed in the days, this became apparent.

Who doesn't want to just disappear, at some point in the day, in a year, to just step off the map and float?