After three decades, I was going to summon the courage to return to camps and to witness this story that I had lived, and to see how it had changed, and to let it ignite my memories so that I could say something important and helpful.

“For me the only way I can have a relationship with divinity is through the unknown, through mystery. If your idea of divinity is leaning into the mystery, you’re more likely to find grace in a variety of places. In my fiction I have tried to make traditionally ugly places beautiful and filled with grace—garbage dumps, malls. I’ve always had that impulse to try to see things not the way the world sees them, but to see the spark of movement and divinity in what is considered to be darkness, ugliness. That makes the most spiritual sense to me.”

Ed Falco has been writing poetry, fiction, and plays for 30 years, but his story “Millat’s Orchids” in Image 102 is his first publication in Image. He took time out of his vacation on the East Coast to talk with Good Letters contributor Brad Fruhauff about his evolution as a person and as an author,…