I stopped being a story teller when I learned to read. I don’t think I ever learned to write. I think I was a story teller long ago, before the truth mattered. Before the truth became an obsession. Truth can get in the way when we want to tell a story. Truth has a way of narrowing the walls around us, putting the pressure on us, and sometimes squeezing the blood from us.
When I look at what I write, the things others would call poetry, the truth is nearly always inversely related to whatever value the words have. You see, there will always be someone who has felt more intense pain or joy. There will always be someone who has behaved more heroically or shamefully than any person about whom I can write. There will always be some common man or woman who has transcended his or her circumstances far better than anybody I have ever met or observed.
If I feel compelled to write about things, acknowledging that whatever great stories I might have had inside were long ago flushed from me by the waters of truth, then I must create people and events. I must conjure them up like ghosts. These apparitions have no form to be washed away.
The people who follow my words like tracks of an animal--predator or prey--should know I feel closest to being one who says something of value when the words are the greatest distance from the texture and grit of events. If I were to tell the truth, it would hurt. It would hurt me to write the truth, and it would hurt the reader who reads it. That reader has often rested complacently with the belief that the words are true, that history is really history rather than one of an infinite number of versions of the truth in this thing one might be inclined to call the book of life.
When you read my words, please don’t forget I don’t like the truth. I avoid it even in my stories that I believe are based on "real" occurrences. I avoid the truth. Yes, I may have seen the eyes of bloodied Vietnamese children when I was twenty, and yes, I may have sat in a bunker and listened to someone tell me they saw innocents slaughtered on the Mekong, or what the young warm blood felt like on their hands, and yes, I may have heard someone’s last words before hospice sleep, but all these things are only shadows cast by some light whose source I cannot see or comprehend.
Truth hurts. If you have read my words before, and felt something, there is no way to rob you of the feeling. Please, however, know that I was doing my utmost to hide the truth, because trying to reveal it would have been even more futile.