How I set out to write about the revolution, and how it changed me

Here’s the talk I gave at the Lucy Parsons Center on May 3. Thanks to everyone who came out!

For many years now, there’s been a picture hanging above my desk. It’s a picture from some publisher’s book catalog, and it shows a rocket pop, one of those red-white-and-blue popsicles, being held up against a sunny sky. Across the popsicle are written the words “PURE FICTION.”

Before I wrote The One-Way Rain, if you asked me what I believed in, I would have pointed to this picture. From a very young...