Everybody has a book in them, the old saying goes, and in most cases that's exactly where it should stay. Yet at the San Miguel Writers' Conference last week, which was full of aspiring writers, I kept running into people with interesting stories to tell: the Australian woman who walked the camino de Santiago with the ashes of her son, the Canadian pilot who built his own plane, the Mexican acupuncturist who is also a poet, the woman who wrote about growing up in Teheran during the revolution, the American grandmother who lived for two years in Mali, the woman from Little Rock who used to babysit Chelsea Clinton, the young psychotherapist from Texas who grew up on a cattle ranch. "Yea," she said casually, "I know how to castrate a bull."
