When I was in second grade, my mother moved from Miami to this evangelical conservative environment in western North Carolina, two miles down the road from Billy Graham and his wife, Ruth.
On the last morning of Virginia's bloodiest year since the Civil War, I built a fire and sat facing a window of darkness where at sunrise I knew I would find the sea.
I've never taken a scalpel to a dead body.
Night fell clean and cold in Dublin, and wind moaned beyond my room as if a million pipes played the air.
Even when I am writing I usually take a break around lunchtime and go for a little walk to clear out my head.
But when I was a little kid, I was always writing stories and illustrating little books that I would create.