Break Back and Dance

This is Montreal, two summers ago, above the salsa pier. This is a girl on the edge, looking down.

Risk it, I want to tell her. Dance. Don't wait to break past yourself.

Within the space of a year, I will have been lucky enough (and yes, a whole lot of luck has been involved) to have published three books—all risks. FLOW, the autobiography of the Schuylkill River, made a whole lot of people wonder out loud: A river's autobiography? Would that be fiction or nonfiction? Would that be a poem? Is there an audience for such a concoction? UNDERCOVER, the novel for young adults, took me to places I hadn't gone as a writer. ZENOBIA, a book I co-authored and due out next January, is a corporate fable, an Alice in Wonderlandesque journey through a sclerotic, crooked, teetering organization—not the usual business book fare, and certainly not the memoir genre with which I began published life.

The point is: I'm out on the edge of a cliff, and I'm happier than I've ever been as a writer. Because of FLOW I've met some of the most daring and compelling people I've ever met (people who care about a city, people who are healing a city). Because of UNDERCOVER I've stumbled into a world of big-hearted readers. And ZENOBIA isn't out yet, but already it is teaching me new things about what people want, what they end up doing.

Break back, I say, and dance.