A young friend of ours, Whitney Martishius, recently saw an art piece that I created for the Miami Art Museum in 1997 hanging on our wall. She read it and was greatly moved by it, so much so that I offered to send her a copy. (The actual artwork is about 6 feet by 5 feet, printed on museum-quality white board.) The piece was part of an exhibition in which the Miami Art Museum combined writers and sculptors. I was paired with the Polish sculptor, Magdalena Abakanowicz (whom I never met, although we corresponded), and at first I hadn't a clue what to do, since her work consists largely of groups of large, obscure, partial human torsos, and is greatly influenced by her childhood experience in Poland of the Nazis during World War II. I ultimately decided to use her own words, from an interview I read with her, which I cut up and rearranged - "sampling" them in the way that a hip hop artist might sample musical or lyrical phrases (I was very influenced by the Frenc