AcknowledgementsTo the teachers I promised I’d thank in a book one day. Not everyone gets great teachers. I had many. You helped me believe I could do this. Thanks for the dream and the tools and confidence to get there. Greg Holowka, you showed me real people could write. I still have the story you wrote about our 4th grade class. Lenora Esau, you not only saw the writer in me, you made me look at all the other people in the world I was inclined to avoid. Myopically introverted fourteen-year-old me needed that. Diane Turner, thanks for not laughing in the face of a pretentious teen with delusions of grandeur.
To my parents, who raised a compulsive reader, an independent thinker and a relentlessly stubborn problem solver. You supported this insane dream more ways than I could have imagine
