Line Leads the Way

Many years ago at the gym, I watched an elderly couple shuffle around the track. The woman was so hunched over she was looking at the floor. I was thinking about disabilities--visible and non-. The lines "We're all a little broken. We're all a little bent" formed in my head. But they didn't go anywhere for a while. In 2017, a Louise Penny novel brought me to Leonard Cohen's "Anthem." "Forget your perfect offering/ There is a crack, a crack in everything. / That's how the light gets in." How I love that. Various other thoughts swirled. The ways we feel inside and outside. Out in the cold. The in crowd. I wanted to write a book that said to kids, "You are inside. Inside the human race. Inside our world. We are all inside." Rush's song “The Larger Bowl” also mixed in. "Why such different fortunes and fates?" So did Melanie Heuiser Hill's Giant Pumpkin Suite, which is where I first heard about kintsugi, the repair of broken pottery using a seam of gold. All these ideas eventually came to life in a story I called Perfectly Broken. Which eventually became Line Leads the Way. I hope you like it!