Edwidge Danticat: I started writing when I was about nine—that's the first thing I remember, writing a little book with my brother and my cousin. The first book I ever got when I was a kid was from my uncle was the Madeline, the first one, in the house in Paris that was covered with vines. It was in French, of course, and I wanted to write one for a long time. Like, I want to write one of those books because, I really felt our house was like that house. My uncle was the, and aunt, she was the nun and, because they were little kids like that. We weren't all girls. I had the great sense of identification with that book, but my brother and my cousin were big readers of comics like TinTin, Astérix, these westerns that came as comics. So we all got together and tried to write one of those and I didn't know how one goes about being a writer. I loved stories, the stories I was told. I loved the stories that I eventually ended up reading and I didn't know how one would write one, but I knew, I said, you know, "I want to do what that book does for me, what the Madeline book does for me, what those books do for me. I want to do that. I want to figure out a way to do that." I didn't know how to put it into words, but I knew that I wanted, I knew from very, very early in my life that I wanted to tell stories.