so i'll tell this story a little bit, but i am meant to be a racer and it was my ambition to be john mcphee basically. i wanted to be a literary nonfiction writer. and i started out in the early 80s, literally by going down to out-of-town news and buying a bunch of writers magazines and looking at how you become a freelance writer. writers magazines i like icicle magazines or cooking magazines. they tell you the same thing over and over and over again in every issue and then i have to figure some way to make it in today's different. what they say and writers magazines is right a query letter if he says yes, a written article. everything else is secondary. so i start doing that. and while he was doing i got a job at the kennedy school writing teaching materials for the faculty there. and they did that until -- i did that for the next 15 years in various ways. i lived on dudley street in her case writing shop offices run dempster street when i got started and moved over to demean jfk building. i lived in north cambridge for years. i was probably in this bookstore two or three times a week the