My Friend Ronald Gottesman Says...that

Your Anatomy Is A Mystery That Nobody Bothers Explaining To Us. Even When We Think We Have Mastered One Woman's Body, Every Body Is Different.

All My Characters Exist In Risk, In The Places We Are Either Too Afraid To Go To, Or Have Enough Privilege Not To Have To, But Whatever The Reason, These Characters I Fashion Go Before Us And Come Back Transformed For Us. For Me, At Least.

I Truly Believe That Writing Is A Continuum--so The Different Genres And Forms Are Simply Stops Along The Same Continuum. Different Ideas That Need To Be Expressed Sometimes Require Different Forms For The Ideas To Float Better.

I Have Not Spoken In Three Years: Not Since I Left Boot Camp. It Has Been Three Years Of A Senseless War, And Though The Reasons For It Are Clear, And Though We Will Continue To Fight Until We Are Ordered To Stop--and Probably For A While After That--none Of Us Can Remember The Hate That Led Us Here. We Are Simply Fighting To Survive The War. It Is A Strange Place To Be At Fifteen, Bereft Of Hope And Very Nearly Of Your Humanity. But That Is Where I Am Nonetheless.

My Mom Taught Me To Read When I Was Two Or Three. When I Was Five I Read And Wrote Well Enough To Do My Nine-year Older Brother's Homework In Exchange For Chocolate Or Cigarettes. By The Time I Was 10, I Was Reading Orwell, Tolstoy's War And Peace, And The Koran. I Was Reading Comic Books Too.