There has always been a fine line for me between the story and the reality. This came as a nasty shock to me in my formative years. I always had this idea that the adventures recorded in books were as real as the highway near my door, so when I set out at the age of seven to follow in the footsteps of Huckleberry Finn, I couldn’t understand what the fuss was all about. Reading about adventure, I sought adventure, reading about detective stories, I became the detective and reading about love I became the lover.

Raised in a family of readers, story tellers, poets and letter writers, words came to me as a river of life. Letters, books and stories swept me into a great ocean of words that was the world outside my door. Books became the vehicle by which I sailed the rivers of life before plunging into an ocean of words.

My mother read the great poets and my father read for information. Rainy afternoons were spent listening to mum reciting The Rime of the Ancient Mariner while dad ferreted out “How To” Books in the library and set to work in the garage. So I always had an idea that books could solve any problem of the human journey. If you ever wanted to know anything about anything then you could track down the answers between the cover of a book or simply duck and dive in the warm prose filled flow of a story, plunge from the end of a poem into ecstacy.

I am in awe of the Indian epics. The Mahabarata contains every story ever told and delves into the journey of the soul across a human landscape in a way that has kept the story alive for thousands of years. That the Ramayana has a place in the actual phsyical landscape of India thrills me no end because here we see the fine line between a story disappear.

Sometimes I am impelled to do stuff just so I can write about it afterwards. As a writer interested in that space between where reality runs out and the story begins, I tend to put myself in a story and then write about that. Or else I will take a line of poetry and follow that to it’s source. One year I followed the story of Ganga and Shiva both through stories and across the plains of India, it was a love story and a lesson in one.