K.

I'm going to be honest: I was warned. Against taking on a high-school internship student, a writer, they said. Against getting involved, again. Didn't I know that I'd run out of hours? Didn't I see the stuff (meaningless, yet demanding stuff) piling up around my house? Didn't I know what happened to me when I let myself care, and I cannot manage not to care. Not ever. I'm all blood and bones with caring.

I knew. I saw. I said yes to K. anyway. It was only a month-long internship. One month, I said to me. One month, because when I asked him what he was reading at the time, his answer was all the persuasion that I needed.

Thing is, this K., this once-high school student, now graduate, this enormously greedy, never fatuous reader, this writer, and let me tell you, what a writer—this K. was no one-month internship deal. He was, how do I say this? A person with a massive heart and a way with words that broke my heart, even as I sat there, all Mentor-like, and attempted to suggest improvements. Will you read this little book about poems, I asked him, and he did. Will you read OUT STEALING HORSES, and he declared it brilliant, because it is brilliant, and that's K., the real K. He knows from brilliant.

And just now, when I was supposed to be interviewing a client, supposed to be pricing a project, supposed to be doing a bunch of ordinary, grown-up, work-a-day things, he sent an email, containing this quote, which was the thing, just then, that I needed to read. So I give it to you. Because hoarding just won't do.

"All right. He would write a book when he got through with this.
But only about the things he knew, truly, and about what he knew.
But I will have to be a much better writer than I am now to handle
them, he thought. The things he had come to know in this war
were not so simply."
-Ernest Hemingway
For Whom the Bell Tolls

K., maybe you'll read THE CELLIST OF SARAJEVO next. Because sometimes the hardest, most complicated, most wrenching of stories have to be contained inside the smoothest of shells. Because your patience with this book will be rewarded. Because it's about war, and not simply.