Jay Kirk at the Hotels Rwanda

You get lucky every once in a while in life; you meet the right people. When I won a Pew Fellowships in the Arts grant back in 2005, I didn't just win time (thanks to a wholly generous appropriation), I won a chance encounter, at a Pew event, with a fellow grant winner named Jay Kirk. He was (and it took about two seconds to figure this out) the real writer in our conversation of two. The kind that treks around the globe, looking and finding. It's not that Jay is fearless; ask him, and he'll rate his fears for you on a sliding scale of ten. It's that Jay is alive, Jay wants to know, Jay has the whole flipping dictionary in his head, and he wants to put a few of those words—subluxation, anyone?—to good use.

I've read some Jay since then. A chapter from his book-in-the-making, Kingdom Under Glass, about the taxidermist Carl Akeley, that had me going apoplectic in my search for justice-doing praise. (I'm a writer; I'm supposed to praise eloquently; all I could think of was, Wow, man. Wow, like, Wow, Jay, that's great.) A couple of archived onliners here and there. His emails, which somehow manage to convey incredible tenderness (toward his wife, his child, his work, his students) while never being anything less than straight-up daggering (is daggering the right word in this context, Jay, tell me, I need more words) smart.

Get to the point, you say. The point is: Read Jay Kirk in this month's GQ. Read his story, "Hotels Rwanda." Because that's where Jay was, a while ago—in Rwanda, a country marked and bloodied by a terrifying genocide, a country whose hope for revival is now pinned to tourist dollars. Yes, you read that right. Tourism in Rwanda. Jay was there, he went traveling, he saw for the rest of us, and the story he's penned isn't just deeply moving and sometimes hilarious and often very sad. The story he penned is Jay, through and through: human and complex and not manipulative and good.

Here's one of my favorite passages, just to get you started:

"This experience has been checked off the list. It isn't just that it's over, but also because it no longer belongs to the exclusive realm of the imagination, and to be quite honest, I think my imagination will miss it."

http://men.style.com/gq/features/landing?id=content_7404