I don't know if I know what's home. What I thought was home never was, and what I'm running toward and trying to catch always seems out of reach. I try to find home within me, but that eludes me too.

All this is bubbling up as my trip to Russia draws nearer and nearer. The conversations on whether or not I can write a black character made me think hard about my own identity and how I'm trying to run away from it because I don't know what it is anymore. Gissel Escudero has sent me this very helpful post by Kristin Nelson of Nelson Agency: Can White Authors Write Characters of Color? Within this post there are links to more posts, each expanding on this topic, so I've read them all, and all the posts linked within those other posts, and so on, and every one of them talked about what many of you and what my writing mentor has been trying to tell me for years (those who know me tried telling me gently, those who don't harshly)—write my truth. As I've seen with TUBE, no matter how hard I try to adopt this new me, the American me, I'm not American. I'm Russian-American, in terms of my ethno-racial group, and I'm Russian by nationality since I was born in Russia and came to America in my twenties and have lived here for almost twenty years (fours years out of those in Germany). But inside me I don't know who I am, really. And I didn't realize what kind of responsibility a black writer's request of me to write a black character would present. And that's facing my own fear of telling my true stories.