5 Things You Should Know About Paulie

Writers have many different ways of beginning a story—through setting, through plot, through character, through theme. The Colors of the Rain began with a character.

Paulie spoke to me when I, fortunately, had my writing notebook open in front of me. While I was working on something else at the time, I jotted down his words, knowing in my gut that I didn’t want to lose them. Over the next couple of weeks, he spoke to me more and more, and I jotted down notes in the margins of my poetry notebo...