The education that prepared me was my general education classes which I tried to avoid when I was a stupid undergraduate but which gave me the foundation of general knowledge that makes a career as a writer possible.
When I was in school my mother stressed education. I am so glad she did. I graduated from Yale College and Yale University with my master's and I didn't do it by missing school.
My grandmother lived to be 100 years old. Her grandmother was a slave yet she was a college graduate in the Spellman class of 1917. She taught art for 50 years and she saved her Social Security checks for her children's education.
By the fourth grade I graduated to an erector set and spent many happy hours constructing devices of unknown purpose where the main design criterion was to maximize the number of moving parts and overall size.
When nearly a third of our high school students do not graduate on time with their peers we have work to do. We must design our middle and high schools so that no student gets lost in the crowd and disconnected from his or her own potential.
I've told my children that when I die to release balloons in the sky to celebrate that I graduated. For me death is a graduation.
My wife and I have been together since 1986. I graduated in '86 and she graduated in '88. We began dating when she was 17. Actually she turned 18 when we started kissing and stuff.
I went to my dad when I was 17 and said 'I want to be a country music star.' Which every dad loves to hear. And he said 'I want you to go to college.' So we had a discussion. And I'm pretty stubborn. I'm a lot like him. And he said 'If you go to college and graduate I'll pay your first six months of rent in Nashville.' So he bribed me.
My dad was the manager at the 45 000-acre ranch but he owned his own 1 200-acre ranch and I owned four cattle that he gave to me when I graduated from grammar school from the eighth grade. And those cows multiplied and he kept track of them for years for me. And that was my herd.
It was actually a women's writing group I belonged to in graduate school that gave me the courage to move from poetry to fiction.