I was raised in a small town on the Great Plains, a sere, windblown, treeless place where the weather was mean and capricious, truck radios were tuned to the agricultural reports and the only live theater was the senior class play. Thanks to the largesse of the otherwise rapacious Andrew Carnegie, however, we had a public library, a building remarkably humble considering the treasures it held within, an institution that can still moisten my eyes with gratitude when I remember it. It was there, if not at my mother's knee, that I became aware that I had a love for words. They seemed to me beings animated not by the author's manipulations, but from within themselves, like jumping beans, with lives and histories and imports all their own. Worn smooth and harmless on the surface by usage, they often possessed a sharp, sly, subversive underside of meaning piled mille-feuille upon meaning going all the way back to the Greek, the Sanskrit, the Gaelic. If one treated them with due respect, they would even take on new significance according to the user. With cajoling one could make them dance and sing. I took to vocabulary with a glutton's hunger that age has not diminished; I still get lost in the dictionary, reading the entries above and below the one I seek, following trails and connections like golden threads spun through all the history and geography and knowledge of mankind. There may be things that people know that they have not put a name to in the English language, but not many.

There was encouragement, of course–from my parents, my teachers, even from the occasional friend who made a fuss–enough so that in time I wrote because I was told I could write. My pleasure had become my craft and even then I realized how lucky that made me in a world where most toil from necessity, not choice. Just exactly what I would write was not yet determined, but I assumed it would be the stories and novels that enchanted me in the library. And then, as the British put it, I was gob-smacked. Well into my teenage years and already bubbling and boiling with an expectation that life was about to start, I saw my first professionally acted play. The words, the words, the glorious downpouring, cascading, Niagra of words. Actors raging and cooing and falling in love and swooning with emotion and collapsing in tragic, garrulous, jabbering mounds of theatrical death. Country youth that I was, I gaped at the sheer verbosity of it all. I was transfixed, I was transformed. Not to sound too much a Wildean effete, it changed my life.