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.

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.

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.

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

I like talking to myself and making patterns out of the letters of the alphabet on blank surfaces.

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.