At eight years old I began writing poetry. I loved the sounds of words, and I loved stringing them together, often nonsensically. I liked the solitude of writing, the secrecy, the fact that I was in control. I did it knowing that poetry carried little weight in the noisy world, but I didn’t care. Over the years as I wrote plays, screenplays, and finally, fiction, I began to appreciate how a well-composed line of poetry, a line of dialogue, a sentence of prose, could elicit a feeling in the reader, often profound, occasionally life-changing. It seemed almost like magic to me. Its solo nature. Its silence.
Meanwhile, every other force in my life was encouraging me to speak up—and speak up loudly.