It’s almost a mirage, that it’s happening. Happened. Today. And as I write this post, the paper looming over my head, a writing I will be doing that will be so different to the writing I have done for this book, this book where the ethics of care looms large, the ties that bind, the ties of friendship, deep and historical friendship, of laughter and of tears, and it occurs to me that I am so grateful to flex muscles I did not know I had. Oh, to think of the obliviousness with which I walked into Grad School, and …

Yesterday, in class, Sam whisper-said to me, and I’m paraphrasing, “post about your book!” I wrote a YA novel called Getting Over Max Cooper. What is it to write a work of fiction? Create a world that is filled with characters that have engines that drive them? Work within a paradigm of writing that is unique to the voice of the character? That was my challenge. To write from a sixteen year old’s perspective, this nuanced and complicated story, that delved into the unbridled tension of the heart but also stay inside the parameters I’d established for those characters—being true …