I am not a troublemaker, honest I'm not. But I don't mind rocking the boat a little, when it gets stuck. I've read philosophy most all of my life since I was first introduced to the work of Wittgenstein. Since then it's been Spinoza, Russell, Leibnitz and a really interesting guy named James P. Carse. I don't always agree with what I read, but read it anyway, 'cause it's good to consider other people's views on important things. As long as they present it logically and sensibly.

I'm a writer and a teacher, too. I lived in the Middle East for a couple of years, voluntarily, as an English teacher. What I didn't know and what we don't know about Islam and the Muslim people should shame us into silence. But most of all I am a child of Appalachia. I'm an eastern Kentuckian, and my non-native friends tell me I sound like it too. They also say it's a good thing my writing doesn't have an accent.

I worry about Appalachia. The region has been exploited by so many for so long, and it always costs the people there some of their dignity and life. We've been fighting Mountain Top Removal there for thirty years, and yet it continues. The cancer rates are off the charts, the poisonings shocking. The mountain streams are under the debris left from removing the mountain tops, and no one seems to care about that. Wildlife dies every day, streams are poisoned every day, and Washington goes on, Sarah Palin goes on as if nothing untoward happened. We have our own genocide going on right here in America, and few outside of the region even know about it. Do you think that if they took the tops off the Rocky Mountains anyone would care about that? I'm not a troublemaker, really. Just rockin' the boat a little.