Writers & Lovers

’m scared of men at this time of night when I’m on foot, not on my bike. I’m scared of men in cars and men in doorways, men in groups and men alone. They are menacing. Men-acing. Men-dacious. Men-tal.

‘I would want kids to talk and write about how the book makes them feel, what it reminded them of, if it changed their thoughts about anything. I’d have them keep a journal and have them freewrite after they read each assignment. What did this make you think about? That’s what I’d want to know.

I sing to the geese. And I feel her. It’s different from remembering her or yearning for her. I feel her near me. I don’t know if she is the geese or the river or the sky or the moon. I don’t know if she is outside of me or inside of me, but she is here. I feel her love for me. I feel my love reach her. A brief, easy exchange

but when your mother tells you something about yourself, even if you’ve coaxed it out of her, it’s hard not to always believe it

I could see all the things I had loved about him, I could see them, but I didn’t love them anymore.’

’s strange, to not be the youngest kind of adult anymore

hen I get close to the end of a first draft, the critic starts pressing against the door. I can feel her. (Funny how when I’m ready for the critic she turns female.) She wants to get her hands on that hot mess. And that is a great pleasure, when you finally have something to let the critic loose on. I write by hand, in notebooks, for my first draft, so for me the next step is to get it onto the computer. That’s when I let the critic in. We work together, shaping, creating new stuff and cutting out the crap. On a good day it is a fun process. On bad days the critic roughs me up a bit. But mostly it’s joyful. It’s my favorite part.

When you are writing something new, when you are in the blank-page stage, what you need, all you need, is your creative, sensual, wide-open brain. Your creator, not your critic. Your worm on the ground.

improvisation is the number-one fear in America. Forget a nuclear winter or an eight point nine earthquake or another Hitler. It’s improv. Which is funny, because aren’t we just improvising all day long? Isn’t our whole life just one long improvisation? What are we so scared of?’

I tell them the truth. I tell them I am thirty-one years old and seventy-three thousand dollars in debt. I tell them that since college I’ve moved eleven times, had seventeen jobs and several relationships that didn’t work out. I’ve been estranged from my father since twelfth grade, and earlier this year my mother died. My only sibling lives three thousand miles away. What I have had for the past six years, what has been constant and steady in my life is the novel I’ve been writing. This has been my home, the place I could always retreat to. The place I could sometimes even feel powerful, I tell them. The place where I am most myself. Maybe some of you, I tell them, have found this place already. Maybe some of you will find it years from now. My hope is that some of you will find it for the first time today by writing.