ABSTRACT
Before she transitioned, I had the privilege of hearing Gwendolyn Brooks speak to various sized audiences in bookstores, classrooms, and theaters in Chicago. She was a small woman whose eyes saw everything and whose talks would turn oft en to a discussion of the writing process. She would tell rooms fi lled with emerging and would-be-writers that our responsibility was to tell the story in front of our nose. And it took a while for me to really digest the enormity of that statement. I had heard it from her lips perhaps a half dozen times and turned that stone over in my hands hundreds perhaps thousands of times until something clicked.
