In Rome I was working on my second book called: Letting Go, a novel, and I worked on it there and when I came back from Rome, I went to teach at the Iowa Writers Workshop in Iowa City, Iowa, and I wrote Letting Go there. Letting Go was… Goodbye Columbus were the efforts of a young man, they... the stories were spontaneous responses to my background. I had no literary theory, I had no literary agenda, I was just spontaneously writing, and that's what... that's what came out. With Letting Go I became more literary in my intention and wanted to write a... a big novel and with lots of people in it and various places in it and lots of dialogue and language and color. And when I wrote it I began to discover the joys of writing a novel rather than a short story, which are really the joys of amplification and you can just keep going and put things in and work on a bigger scale.