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

The truth, and nothing but the truth, is that dawn begins with a wrestling match with my soul and a systematic rejection of all the other useful possibilities a day offers. I make obeisance to the story, its characters, and the muse with burnt offerings.

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

I come from a culture that has refined the art of the dirge to a sublime level.

Burma evoked the lost Kenyan soldiers who served in the war. You never hear about them. There were a significant number of casualties, men who never came back home. But they're never commemorated.

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

The young readers I have interacted with carry old concerns repackaged in the skin of a new generation: puzzlement over continuous national moral failings, contradictions with the elders, nostalgia for a nonexistent Kenyan past.