“Even as a high school student my fictions were not about me. I tilted toward what Edgar Allan Poe called “Arabesques,” or what others might consider tales from The Twilight Zone. I didn’t find my life interesting enough, so I invented. Of course, what I’d experienced or read or overheard influenced my scenes and sometimes my dialogue, but family and friends would be hard-pressed to find themselves inside what I wrote. Everything was disguised. Writing for me was very close to acting, each role a fleshing out, yet finding something of myself in each.”