Capo, My First Golden Retriever, So Loved

I Believe That To Create Real-seeming Characters, The Writer Must Be Willing To Go On A Voyage Of Self-exploration. It Can Be Revealing And Even Painful To Explore Your Own Weakness, But It Gives You Genuine Emotion. Characters In Fiction Come Alive Because Of The Believability Of Their Emotional Lives And That Is What I Strive To Create.

The Decimation Of Lebanon Was Showing Up In Chicago As A Series Of Restaurants And Little Shops, Just As The Destruction Of Vietnam Had Been Visible Here A Decade Earlier. If You Never Read The News But Ate Out A Lot You Should Be Able To Tell Who Was Getting Beaten Up Around The World.

While We Were Walking Around, We Came To The Catholic Church, And We Saw That Some People Had Set Fire To Carpets And Banked Them Around The Rectory, Which Was Made Out Of Wood. They Knew Every Fire Truck On The South Side Was Going To Be In The Park, That The Rectory Would Just Burn To The Ground. Our One Little Act Was Putting Out That Fire.

When I Tell People I Was In The St. Justin Martyr Parish, If They Are Native Chicagoans They Know Exactly Where I Was And What That Was Like. The Sunday Before This Particular March, The Archbishop Of Chicago, Cardinal Cody, Had Required All Of His Pastors To Read A Letter In Support Of Open Housing And Economic Justice In Every Parish In The City.

I Admire About Hillary: Every Time I Am Going To Walk Away From Her Candidacy, I Think, She Has Absorbed More Hate Than Anyone I Can Think Of Over The Past Twenty Years, And She Hasn't Cracked Under It. That's A Kind Of Iron Fortitude That Maybe We Need In The President Of The United States. People Project On To Hillary Because She Is A Woman. They Either Hate Her For Everything They Hate About Women Or They Long For Her To Be Everything They Want In A Woman. It's An Impossible Burden.