The most important set of understandings that I bring to that position of citizen,

Love is the extremely difficult realization…

To sin by silence, when we should protest, Makes cowards out of [us]

When great trees fall,

rocks on distant hills shudder,

If she had lived 100 years it would have been too few.

In a world where women are expected to comply, she said "I dissent."

Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the one who hated, and this was an immutable law. . .

The last time I wrote in this space, I talked about poetic images in picture-book texts.

I’m a great admirer of poetry (and poets), but I am not a poet.  I can occasionally stumble upon a truly fresh image when I’m writing, but mostly I have to turn to other devises to give my picture-book texts resonance.

If you can only be tall because someone is on their knees,

I once had a friend, a poet, who taught me important lessons about poetry.

The most memorable one—and she was emphatic about this lest I miss the point—was that I am not a poet.

The period of time after I have finished one writing project and before I have found my way to the next is always a fraught one.  I pack a manuscript off to my editor after many months, sometimes years, of immersion and wake the next morning to a vacuum.  A vacuum filled with questions.

I, like every other writer I know—at least every other publishing writer, spend far more time revising than I do writing the original draft.  I even prefer revising to the initial process of filling a blank page.

I have always believed in story.  I believe in it still.

But I am learning something in these late days of my career.  Stories don’t have to be inventions.  They can come from the world of very solid facts.