I’m a writer because my seventh and eighth grade students made a writer out of me.  They were the people I new the best and liked the best, and from our first mornings together, I knew things about them their parents dared never know. Never. And after all, all fiction is about secrets anyway.  One of the things I noticed from the young, one of the things they taught me, was they wanted a story. I loved history. I loved non-fiction. I loved biography. That’s what I read, but they wanted a story.

So they lead me to fiction. I didn’t know if I could write fiction, but I certainly knew I wanted to communicate with them and they dictated the form. And so I now write mostly about the past. That’s been my mandate ever since 9/11, which happened in the city where I work.  And I realized that history repeated that there was a pearl harbor at either end of my life. But my readers now were born in the 21st century and do not remember 9/11, and so the beat goes on.

I learned history from old folks when I was a kid—the old men who hung out on the pump island at my dad’s filling station and recalled riding the great wheel in 1893 at the world’s fair in Chicago. I grew up in a generation that remembered the Depression—were still scarred by it, were still hoarding food because of it. And yet they made the Depression sound like a wonderful paradise lost—destroyed by World War II

So I learned history on a very personal basis. But the young people I know today don’t know grand parents.  They don’t live where grandparents are. They don’t have old folks sitting on porch swings monitoring the street. In fact, the only porch swing left is a book, and I’m sitting in it telling them a story.

So, for me, a novel is an invitation into the past that our kids are not getting in school today. They don’t know any history. They’re not learning history. They’re not learning it in college, and they’re not learning that other history linked to necessity for the writer: They call it geography. We called it map study. I haven’t seen a map in a classroom in this century and yet I was a grade school kid during World War II: We did map study every morning.

The Battle of the Bulge, Hiroshima, the Guadalcanal, a glamorous terrifying outside world—names still burned into my brain--a great love of the map and all the history it brings.