When I Began To Read,

I Keep Threatening To Keep A Formal Journal, But Whenever I Start One It Instantly Becomes An Exercise In Self-consciousness. Instead Of A Journal I Manage To Have Dozens Of Notebooks With Bits And Pieces Of Stories, Poems, And Notes. Almost Every Thing I Do Has Its Beginning In A Notebook Of Some Sort, Usually Written On A Bus Or Train.

I Joined The Army On My Seventeenth Birthday, Full Of The Romance Of War After Having Read A Lot Of World War I British Poetry And Having Seen A Lot Of Post-world War Ii Films. I Thought The Romantic Presentations Of War Influenced My Joining And My Presentation Of War To My Younger Siblings.

But In The End, We Learn We Can Forgive Most People. The Cushion Of Mortality Makes Their Wrongdoing Seem Less Dark, And Whatever Roads They Traveled Seem Less Foolhardy.

I Read A Lot Of Comic Books And Any Kind Of Thing I Could Find. One Day, A Teacher Found Me. She Grabbed My Comic Book And Tore It Up. I Was Really Upset, But Then She Brought In A Pile Of Books From Her Own Library. That Was The Best Thing That Ever Happened To Me.

I Couldn't Speak Well. I Went To Speech Therapy For 10 Years. And I Was Sort Of Frustrated In That Sense.