I think I might be a boomerang, because I managed to ricochet around the planet a few times before landing in the place where my story started, in a manner of speaking. I'm originally from New York and when I left home at 16, my father told me to work in restaurants because then I would always eat, at least. I went to poetry readings at places that no longer exist with people who no longer exist until I too was a bit too close to that particular precipice. So I left, and went to corners all over the world, started studying politics until I was inches from a PhD and realized that I didn't want to be an academic. That I wasn't, after all, an academic.

Then I didn't feel like much of a writer, either. So I packed up and moved to a farm in Italy where I grew food and harvested olive oil and hid away for the time I needed to hide. And then, at some point, I realized that I liked it here, despite my best efforts. Strangely, I live not so far from the very place my great grandparents left more than a century before, to find their own something. And here we are, lost but less so, and back to writing.