I grew up on the South Side of Chicago, and though I haven’t lived there in a long while, I remain in a love affair with the city, London too, if I’m being precise. I know Chicago, and somehow, London knows me. Both break my heart in their own way. I often think that if you know when and where I grew up, that’s all you really need to know about me. It will tell you most of what’s important anyway. The years I’ve spent far away from Chicago, in England, Belgium, Taipei, Hong Kong, the Pacific Northwest, and other places, have only been additives to what was formed long ago by family poker nights, neighborhood aunties, and trips down south to visit family who’d declined the Great Migration and stayed put in Louisiana.

From childhood through college, I wrote, until one day on Princeton’s campus, a mysterious gray-haired man with a saucy scarf and a tweed jacket told me, “You’re doing it wrong.” There was something about his affectation that suggested to my young self that he knew something I didn’t. I had been raised by a man who adored his mother and had ten sisters. He believed women held up more than half the sky. It had never occurred to me that I could write “wrong,” outside of the hard work of craft, that is. Anyway, the man offered up a couple of authors he found compelling and bounded off across campus while I stood there with my confidence pooling around my feet. I didn’t seriously attempt to write again until a few years ago. Was it age, wisdom, time, a rare alignment of stars that flipped the switch? I don’t know. I just know that I felt it again, and so I began again; figuring out the intimacy of the stories I want to tell, gradually turning up the lights until it’s all bright, and brutal, and real, and I can write about what’s underneath.

And when I picture the long-ago mystery man of strong opinions, I see Bagley from the 1989 film How to get Ahead in Advertising - about a man with a talking boil on his neck. Turns out boils give awful advice.

That scarf was stupid anyway.

Thunderclouds and forests. Don’t much care for sunshine unless it’s cold outside.