Stories don’t write themselves. My mind has to open. Characters emerge from nerve cells. Sometimes I’m telling old stories, David and Bathsheba, Paris and Helen, Moses in the bulrushes. Lovers, adulterers, and warriors. Cuckolds and whores. Orphans and sisters. They all turn on the cycle.

Every family has a storyteller, a bard, who like Homer, tells their story to whomever listens. My mother was a storyteller, but her words never hit the paper in a typewriter,or the pages of a bound book.

Every word I place in the ether, this new vellum, are the words my mother never had the chance or time or freedom to tap out on the keys of her Royal portable.

So here goes.