My first book was a humble print run of one by a small press just outside of Pittsburgh. Mr. Stubbs Strikes Again told the story of a misguided bear who inadvertently solved crimes and then ate the bronze medals he was given, having mistaken them for chocolate every time. As the nine-year-old proprietor of this press, the tools of my trade were construction paper and pencil. Mr. Stubbs may not have been very bright, but he knew what he loved and he had a strong sense of justice.

As a teenager, my grandfather, who was many things – a professor at the Annenberg School, a poet, a critic, an artist – taught me the somewhat earth-shattering news that not all poetry need rhyme. But as an angst-riddled teenager, I needed the structure of the rhyme. Without the rhyme, I discovered, I had no poetry.

So I turned to fiction instead. A thick book called Queenie was an early favorite, as were the stolen Harlequin romances from my girlfriend’s mother’s extensive collection. The Harlequins stunted me for a few years as I’d dropped out of high school by then and was earning my keep at a Mexican restaurant called Casa Lupita, where I served as busboy, hostess, or dishwasher, depending on the number of employee no-shows we had. My only literary memory from this period was Are You There God?
It’s Me Margaret. (Margaret should have asked me.)

After a few years of too many nights in my blue Oldsmobile Omega or on friend’s couches, I begged an administrator at a small college outside of Chicago to let me in. He did. Soon, I was onto Anne Tyler and Sue Miller, and then to graduate school in Boston where I studied – if such a thing can be studied – fiction. And then advanced fiction. But what I really studied were the writers, those who struggled but kept at it day after day after day. Emerson College taught me the same thing I’d learned in the time of the blue Olds: I could handle the struggle.

As a writer and journalist, I’ve traveled all over the world, from Che’s widow’s house in Cuba, to the Dalai Lama’s monastery in India, to zero gravity in Houston, from the backstage hallways at a Kiss concert to the shattered coastline of post-tsunami Indonesia, to the dark mud rooms of a middle eastern women’s prison. My favorite stories are scenes in my memory…a brilliant geographer from New Mexico searching for a lost American highway, a collection of homeless teenagers scattered across the United States, a spooky mountain in Vietnam searching for fallen soldiers.

I’ve written for some great magazines: the New York Times magazine, the New Republic, Men’s Journal, Glamour, Jane, Travel & Leisure, Slate, Salon… And I’ve contributed to some great radio programs: This American Life, Marketplace, All Things Considered. In 2006, I won an Overseas Press Club award for a radio piece on This American Life. In 2007, my first book—FUGITIVE DENIM: A Moving Story of People and Pants in the Borderless World of Global Trade—will be published. It’s a narrative look at how people live while they’re trying to survive global trade rules. These days, I divide my time between the States and Cambodia.

I’ve learned that in my own writing there are two kinds of stories I love: those of salvation and those of searching. Put another way, you might say I learned most of what I’d ever need to know about writing—and about a  boundless passion for chocolate—from Mr. Stubbs.