So, nettled, I took an empty notebook and a pen and I went down to the gazebo at the bottom of the garden and during the course of the afternoon I wrote this story. I got to read it aloud for the first time a few weeks later at a benefit at the legendary CBGBs. It was the best possible location to read a story about punk and 1977, and it made me feel very happy.

“THE DAY THE SAUCERS CAME”

Written in a hotel room in New York the week I read the audio book of my novel Stardust, while waiting for a car to come and take me away, for editor and poet Rain Graves, who had asked me for a couple of poems for her Web site at www.spiderwords.com. I was happy to discover that it worked when read before an audience.

“SUNBIRD”

My oldest daughter, Holly, told me exactly what she wanted for her eighteenth birthday. “I want something nobody else could ever give me, Dad. I want you to write me a short story.” And then, because she knows me well, she added, “And I know you’re always late, and I don’t want to stress you out or anything, so as long as I get it by my nineteenth birthday, you’re fine.”

There was a writer from Tulsa, Oklahoma (he died in 2002), who was, for a little while in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the best short story writer in the world. His name was R. A. Lafferty, and his stories were unclassifiable and odd and inimitable-you knew you were reading a Lafferty story within a sentence. When I was young I wrote to him, and he wrote back.

“Sunbird” was my attempt to write a Lafferty story, and it taught me a number of things, mostly how much harder they are than they look. Holly didn’t get it until her nineteen-and-a-halfth birthday, when I was in the middle of writing Anansi Boys and decided that if I didn’t finish writing something-anything-I would probably go mad. With her permission it was published in a book with an extremely long title, often abbreviated to Noisy Outlaws, Unfriendly Blobs, and Some Other Things That Aren’t As Scary…, as a benefit for the literacy program 826 NYC.