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I often mention to students what I call “The Writer’s Palette.” I call it that because I was a painter before I wrote. Most of my parallels come from painting...

My dad whistled. Cheer was part of his nature. He whistled around the house and in the car, and sometimes he sang.

It was the feeling under my father’s words that recorded itself in me. My father’s feeling was, then, and is now, my ground. Not his feelings. But his Feeling. The world of his feeling that included the cosmos...

Facets of clear amber stone that flash. There is a dimension between the flashes. Julie called it the interstices. That’s where the story, with all its trauma and love that Julie bequeathed me, lives.

We step onto firm ground when Marilyn gets to the thing that is waiting, underneath everything she says, the thing she can't forget. Right there, in the middle of the air, we're standing on something solid.

I might have thought he was in another world, but it was me. I was young, true, but I don't think that sense of otherness has ever left me. I was moving, certainly; with Jahn, my wings, like a new butterfly, grew manifest. But I'd never, I believe now, leave the world of childhood.

My place has been staged all summer, chairs and umbrellas distanced 10 or more feet, for the few friends who have visited. And when they go, the chairs are empty, still, orderly and beautiful. Waiting...

When I had my own children I moved to Long Island. In the summer, I felt nostalgia, trapped in the airless frenzy of traffic, the earth paved over, asphalt heat waves, car exhaust. I dreamed of moving to the country, but didn’t see how I could uproot. I wished it would happen miraculously. Then it did.

It seems to me, amidst our tragic circumstances, person to person, we are connecting with one another, that there is a new world coming forth. It may take time, this birth. But I believe it is happening...

They are migrants. Their lives were saved. They came to a new place and added such beauty, a yellow different from the broom plants, the evening primrose, the Gloriosa lilies, Stella D’oros, the pale yellow lilies, names unknown to me, and the tiny yellow flowering ground cover, another gift of this place to me—its name also unknown. A shimmering time of yellows, the beginning of July...