"People don't forget what you tell em."

There's no use trying to hide it: my life is all over my writing. I dress my poems up in clothes that reek of me. A friend reading my fiction will eventually come to a page (more sooner than later) and say, "Hey! This is me!"

I'm a terrible liar. I'm sorry. And I'm not. 

I begin writing with what I know. I keep a notepad in my back pocket and every day I jot images and lines. There are pages of dialog in a notebook from a conversation I had with a homeless man at the park down the street from my old neighborhood. My imagination appreciates the head start memories give it. Each project is like a relay race. Once the memories run their laps (with enough discipline) my imagination kicks in, ready for the baton pass, warmed up to continue the course.

That homeless man I mentioned just now, his name is Frank, and we met entirely by coincidence. I just happened to be at the bench he was at the day before, where he left his book. He didn't mind me taking down our whole conversation once we got started. He even told me that I dropped my pen when it fell and I reached for another so as not to miss anything . I transcribed the conversation knowing it would be difficult to write a piece about a homeless person because I have never been there and I don't want to write a cliché "dirty, smelly man in baggy, tattered clothing mumbling nonsense" type of character. I want him to come through how I got to see him.

In a TED talk about humanity, my former professor Chris Abani explained how, in order for us to be human, people have to reflect our humanity back at us; we must see it in each other. He referred to this philosophy as "Ubunto".  Abani said that there is no way for us to be human without other humans.

This is what I know about Frank: he smokes cigarette butts to the filter. Even though he drinks his beer from a plastic bottle he keeps a lemon to peel and squeeze the juice into. He carries a book on Christianity though he knows most people don't like to hear about religion. Frank wanted to be a marriage counselor when he was nineteen.

I believe art, the written word in particular, works along the lines of "Ubunto". Stories should give the reader some reflection of themselves when they read them. This is why I write my characters as human as possible. I get as close to them as I can. I write what I know then I begin to explore what I don't yet understand. What I don't understand, at first, is what pulls at me to write what I write, though I know there is something significant in the fact that two totally different men are able to share words for a moment in their lives.

It's been a few days since I met Frank and I've gone through many drafts of story I can put him in. I keep revising and passing the baton from memory to imagination. I won't stop until Frank comes across the page as he did when he dropped the kickstand on his mountain bike and took a seat across from me. 

-Michael Torres, Operations Manager and Poetry Editor at Blue Earth Review