Relationships Do Not Preclude Issues Of Morality.

It Was Not In My Nature To Be An Assertive Person. I Was Used To Looking To Others For Guidance, For Influence, Sometimes For The Most Basic Cues Of Life. And Yet Writing Stories Is One Of The Most Assertive Things A Person Can Do. Fiction Is An Act Of Willfulness, A Deliberate Effort To Reconceive, To Rearrange, To Reconstitute Nothing Short Of Reality Itself. Even Among The Most Reluctant And Doubtful Of Writers, This Willfulness Must Emerge. Being A Writer Means Taking The Leap From Listening To Saying, "listen To Me."

A Lot Of My Upbringing Was About Denying Or Fretting Or Evading.

They Were Things For Which It Was Impossible To Prepare But Which One Spent A Lifetime Looking Back At, Trying To Accept, Interpret, Comprehend. Things That Should Never Have Happened, That Seemed Out Of Place And Wrong, These Were What Prevailed, What Endured, In The End.

But She Has Gathered That Americans, In Spite Of Their Public Declarations Of Affection, In Spite Of Their Miniskirts And Bikinis, In Spite Of Their Hand-holding On The Street And Lying On Top Of Each Other On The Cambridge Common, Prefer Their Privacy.

Amid The Gray, An Incongruous Band Of Daytime Blue Asserts Itself. To The West, A Pink Sun Already Begins Its Descent. The Effect Is Of Three Isolated Aspects, Distinct Phases Of The Day. All Of It, Strewn Across The Horizon, Is Contained In His Vision.