I am indebted to anyone who has ever written anything. I am indebted to the unknown carver of pictograms on a gallery of stone panels, which I encountered and stood in silence before on top of a distant odd-shaped hill in northern Kenya. For whatever reason the muses have most unexpectedly invited me to join this immense procession. I am humbled and delighted.

One day, I was running to the river. Along the way there was the most exquisite butterfly, a tiny little thing, on the pavement. I kind of jumped over it. And then two days later I woke up in the middle of the night with a character running, jumping over butterflies on the streets of Nairobi. After that, I followed the story. The story wrote itself.

Every Kenyan writer has offered me something to hold onto, something to believe in.

Dying away from home, away from the soil of your birth - and to do so unseen and unmourned - is a profound horror.

It may not seem that way, but I am an absolute optimist, an unrepentant optimist.

Even if you're in charge of the grand story there's still memory. The other stories do not go away.

Recording stories is a way of honoring the faculty of memory, even if it's recorded, outsourcing memory to technology.