I gave an outdoor poetry reading yesterday in Chimacum, Washington. And I heard two of the greatest things that a writer can hear. A poet told me that I was one of the big reasons why he started writing poems. And a mother told me that my Young Adult novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, was the first novel that her teen son had ever loved and it turned him into a reader. Lovely stuff. And I also remembered early in my career when I read at an outdoor arts festival in downtown Portland, Oregon. There were maybe ten people listening to me as a Mariachi marching band warmed up down the block. I learned a valuable lesson that day: Poetry loses to Mariachi bands every time.