Contrary to this theory, I had Malcolm. I had my mother and father. I had my readings of every issue of The Source and Vibe. I read them not merely because I loved black music - I did - but because of the writing itself. Writers Greg Tate, Chairman Mao, dream hampton - barely older than me - were out there creating a new language, one that I intuitively understood, to analyze our art, our world. This was, in and of itself, an argument for the weight and beauty of our culture and thus of our bodies.

In each case the writer was possessed of an insight that organized the writing, and in each case a persona had been created to serve the insight. I became enraptured, tracing out the development of the persona in memoir after essay after memoir (it was out of this rapture that I realized I was a nonfiction writer). I began to read the greats in essay writing—and it wasn’t their confessing voices I was responding to, it was their truth-speaking personae.

If William Hazlitt hadn’t awakened each morning crawling inside his own skin, he could not have written “On the Pleasure of Hating.” If Virginia Woolf didn’t have difficulty attaching herself to life, she would not have written “The Death of the Moth.” If James Baldwin wasn’t in perpetual violent struggle to bring the black and the white inside himself under control, there would be no “Notes of a Native Son.” These pieces are the work of writers engaged at the deepest level with the essay.

Sexual abuse like the kind Willa experienced robs a person of innocence. Instead of discovering erotic life in a natural way with a peer, sexuality was forced upon her. Any pleasure she might have found in the awakening of her sensuality was contaminated from the beginning with confusion and shame.

That said, there are three prevalent sources of fuel for the inner fire across the vastly different lives in the study. In addition to love of the doing, the two others are:

Extend Out/Circle Back: This is a continuous dynamic process of extending yourself— growing, learning, experimenting, expanding capabilities, discovering new encodings— while simultaneously drawing upon encodings discovered and capabilities developed earlier in life.