This Is The Forked Tongue Of Grief

I Was Astonished To Find That The Positions My Grandfather Had Defended Were Now Overgrown And Entangled With Trees And Thorns. I Suppose I Had Developed A Sense Of Reverence For The Locations He Described In His Memoirs And Letters - The Forts And The High Emplacements. I Had Expected Them To Have Been Preserved In Some Way.

I Write In The Novel's Afterword That Our Recent Wars "finish Not With Victory Or Defeat But With A Calendar Draw-down Date And A Presumption That We Shall Never Be Reconciled With The Enemy".

A Scar Is Never Ugly. That Is What The Scar Makers Want Us To Think. A Scar Does Not Form On The Dying. A Scar Means, I Survived.

Sad Words Are Just Another Beauty. A Sad Story Means, This Storyteller Is Alive

There's What People Say, And There's What People Mean, And I Like To Explore The Difference Between The Two.