. . . When I was a kid, it was Steinbeck and Jack London. First of all, they were local, which seemed important to me for some reason. But it was also that they were pure storytellers. I mean, I was a reader. That’s what I did when I was a kid. I really didn’t have many friends — but I had my books. So I knew how to read, or I learned — I guess mostly because the woman next door was a teacher. She taught literature classes, and I think she felt sorry for me because I was such a sad little freak, but she used to give me a lot of books, pretty challenging stuff for a kid — like Homer and Chekhov, Turgenev, Hamson, and a lot of Greek literature, the historians and all that, like Herodotus and Xenophon and Thucydides. She loved the Greeks, and she made me love them as well. So I knew great writing, and I appreciated its beauty and difficulty, its value. But it was the storytellers I really loved. Like I said, Steinbeck and London mostly.
   So, maybe that’s it, but I just love sitting here afternoons, here in the Fringe, especially when John and Charlie are in town, and listening to everyone’s stories. And, although they clearly enjoy telling them, I’m always the one doing the asking.
   I just sit here, a little high, and float off with them — wherever they go or have been.
  You know, I never really wanted to go to sea, but I sure love hearing about having been to sea. Like John, I always ask him about the ports he’s just seen. And he knows how to tell a story. He seems to naturally focus on the subtleties, the details, not necessarily bizarre, fantastic events. He never tries to weave some overwrought pseudo-Biblical tale, it’s always about the nuances or the subtly noteworthy; just like, for instance, the strangeness and bustling energy of, say, the Port of Bangkok, or maybe Singapore, or Rotterdam — especially at four in the morning or so, on shore-leave with lots of money and a head full of liquor.
   Or Charlie, he has a way of describing what it’s like to be out there in all that vast empty space day and week after week — like telling me about doing his rounds on deck during terrible open-sea storms, the vast biting cold and loneliness at midnight, ten thousand miles from home, or about the ship being locked down and him having to stand guard because there were supposed to be pirates in the area. You know, not about a pirate attack, but about the waiting, the psychology of waiting for extraordinary moments, which interests me much, much more.
   I suppose it’s simply my curiosity about how other people live. Like your pictures, your portraits. Why do we care about portraits of people — particularly of people we don’t know?
   My guess is it’s because there’s something fascinating about the fact that so many others are trying or have tried to do exactly what we’re trying to do, you know, exist, survive, and maximize the pleasure and fulfillment in our lives while, simultaneously, trying to minimize the pain and disappointment.
So, for you for instance, your portraits, even with portraits of celebrities, or of troubled or damaged people — why do they interest us so much? My guess is it’s that we’re trying to learn — either from their successes or their mistakes. There’s that fantasy, that suspicion, that we’re probably a lot like they are or were. And had circumstances been different, or should they change in the future, we might be that person in the picture, whether it be of a success or a failure.
   Seems to me we’re always looking for extra assistance in our struggles, from astrologers, palm readers, psychotherapists, pharmacists, or, as in my case, you know, stories of one sort or another — the stories of people’s lives, either in pictures or in words — I think they fascinate us because they could be us. Right?. . .