I am, as it were, the created creating—a paradox, for all its rhetorical trappings, at the beating heart of our shared human journey, and one I invite you to struggle with just as I have while, day in and day out, word by word and line by line, constructing a fictitious autobiography for myself in these pages.

Finally, we entered Chetaube County, my imaginary birthplace, where the names of the little winding roads and minuscule mountain communities never failed to inspire me: Yardscrabble, Big Log, Upper, Middle and Lower Pigsty, Chicken Scratch, Cooterville, Felchville, Dust Rag, Dough Bag, Uranus Ridge, Big Bottom, Hooter Holler, Quickskillet, Buck Wallow, Possum Strut ... We always say a picture speaks a thousand words, but isn’t the opposite equally true?

Why should anything exist at all, you might ask?Existence didn't just spring out of nothing whatsoever. Even if there was a time of No-Thingness, then there must have been an inherent or precursory realm of possibility; a possibility that something -- anything -- such as the imaginal, might exist.Why are we here at all? Because this was a possibility, and we are the living proof that there must have been such a possibility. So, you might say that existence, in one form or another, was even more than more likely, it was inevitable.