For Kenya: we have a chance to start again each time we meet one another. The ghosts do not need to define the future.

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.

In my perfect imagination, with stern discipline I rise with the first bird, salute the dawn, have a healthy breakfast of fruits, wander over to my faux-oak desk, tap the On button on my Macbook Air, acknowledge the muse, and skip into the world where the story flows over the day and into the night.

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

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.

Kenya is a mercurial character. I feel the country has a presence that can turn on its people in a very violent way.

Matters of the subconscious affect reality in ways we don't quite realize.