While I've been a writer since newspapers and magazines roamed the earth, I’ve been a storyteller for as long as I can remember. It's always been my view that truth is stranger than fiction and usually more entertaining. Or more shocking, reassuring, puzzling or awe inspiring, as the case may be.
Many of my favorite authors – Balzac, Wharton and Sinclair Lewis to name a few – bring a documentary lens to their fiction. Without this deep respect for the authentic, there are no parties in West Egg, no odysseys on the Pequod or steamboats into the heart of darkness. Proust’s fictional Combray was so clearly truthful that it has become an actual village in France. We shouldn't blame the storytellers for trusting their eyes and ears. Especially now, when we need human eyes and ears more than ever.
I was born in Paterson, New Jersey, one of the capitals of the rust belt, and grew up just a block from the river that powered the city and the nation for 150 years. My first college apartment was within earshot of the Great Falls and I spent many hours staring at them in quiet contemplation, like so many others before and since. The sensory effects of this lesser Niagara, which improbably slices through the most densely populated U.S. city after New York, are nothing less than mesmerizing. They elicit dreams as easily as any soporific, and I’m grateful to have been able to capture some of them in my debut collection.
Today, having exchanged both Paterson and New York for the relentless sunshine of Los Angeles, I often think back to those rushing waters and wonder who might be sitting there now, staring ahead and dreaming. May their dreams be as everlasting as mine have been.