"For years I tried to write about the racial conflict in my Southwest Georgia county as I experienced it growing up in the 1950's and 60's, but I didn't trust my own voice to speak honestly about living in the midst of that turbulent time.  Who was I then?  Even more important, who was I now?

Ten years ago, an accident in the Smoky Mountains left me laid up with a broken ankle for weeks.  I had plenty of time to read and think.  So I opened my notebook and began writing a sonnet about growing up in the deep South.  One sonnet led to another and into the material I'd tried to write about for so long.  As another native Georgian, the fiction writer Flannery O'Connor, once said, "Our limitations are our gateways to reality."  The precise iambic pentameter and rhyme scheme of the sonnet had opened the gate to this particular reality and enabled me to render it into poetry."