where gore vidal covers, I tread

In the Introduction to the Collected Stories of Tennessee Williams, the brilliant essayist and author Gore Vidal wrote, "Like most natural writers, Tennessee could not possess his own life until he had written about it."

When I read those words something in me trembled. Vidal had explained, very matter of fact and succintly, what it meant for me to do the writing I have done, to expose the navel I have gazed forlornly upon and to take my life and infuse it into the fiction writing I have made. I was so struck by these words and their subsequent explanation that I realized I had been frantically reading through two pages before I took a breath.

As I considered that needing to take hold of my life was the driving force behind my writing, I immediately thought of this journal and those before it, that held a flashlight to my life and showed the scurry of the pests inside the shadows. And as I have grown older and more modest, I realize that I have been denying myself this kind of writing in an effort to be entertaining or funny or happy...