It’s true for me too: I begin—and end—with that initial verbal wound. I seem to forget this each time I enter a new story. I am every hopeful that a story will take me someplace else, that the first paragraph is merely a launch into dark space, new territory. Time and time again, however, the process proves to me that the entire story exists in the initial paragraph; that rather than moving away from that first image, my process is to enter inside of it somehow, by swelling each fragment and making a descent. I am not launched from the beginning so much as sucked inside a bunch of words with incredible force.