Gloria,

This is such a lovely response. Thank you so much. I like the idea of the ripples. I always feel that when we write…here or anywhere else…that we let our stories go like the little paper boats we’d make as kids and set a lake or a pond. We had such great notions and imaginations, as if they’d travel the world! The boars would took off or sometimes not. They did as they pleased or as the wind or the ducks at our particular pond pleased, or as the water pleased. Most of them sunk. But we learned and made stronger boats using construction paper and then cardboard.

I think of my stories as I do those little boats. Once I wrote one and launch it, it follows the ripples. A reader decides as if she is the wind or the ducks or the water, decides what becomes of my story. They make it their own. I suspect I even lose control of the meaning as that, too, becomes the reader’s. Like life, we truly don’t have much control. Things happen.

The best stories reach us, later or now, with a meaning steeped in ourselves with the help of the writer.

My story fell out and the ripples are taking it where it is supposed to go. I believe, too, that someone will read it and make of it just what they need. I’d prefer, if I have any choice, that it help someone else who was raped even thought I wrote it hoping to help those who don’t “get” that rape is always and only the fault of the perpetrator. Thanks to you, I realize that I let the ripples take my own story to a better place than before…just where it was meant to go.

That’s a pretty awesome and meaningful thought. Thank you!