Dear Teacher,

I remember you sitting at the head of our small rectangular table in a classroom where I, along with a motley group of mostly older women, decided to take a writing class. Some of us were new to poetry, but many of us were trying to find a way back to poetry as adults.

Poetry was still thousands of miles away though. Despite being in my thirties, I was still learning how to pronounce my own name. Do you know that Li-Young Lee said that a sentence is a unit of identity…. A line, too, is an instance of identity?^xi For me, writing felt like an act of identity-making. Each word, a clavicle, a femur, each sentence, an organ.

I still remember how excited you seemed the day you told us that your book would be published. At that very moment, I decided that I, too, wanted to publish a book, just one book of poems in my life. If someone who looked like me could publish a book of poems, then maybe I could do the same. How little I knew at the time, that both writing and publishing could be relentlessly unforgiving.

During the break, as you lay the little workshop papers down on the ground, got on your hands and knees to sort them, I said, Congratulations on your new book! You leaned and bent, white papers in small stacks staring up at me like faces. Thanks! you said. After that, a wind kept blowing in my body. Even when I shut my mouth, the wind kept leaking in.

I still remember the joys of my first book. It’s true, except in the rarest of circumstances, a first book most likely won’t change one’s life in immediate, external ways. But I know my first book changed me. I never stopped wanting after that. Not only books, but to be surprised again and again by the possible collusions of language. And the more I read, the more I realized how hard writing well really was. The more I read, the better I wanted to write.

Each book isn’t just a book, but a period of a life, a period of learning how to write. Each book has its own hair color, its own glasses, its own favorite mug, its own computer, its own shirt and pants, its own tears.

Sometimes I think that writers are too self-absorbed. I often think about what Sylvia Plath wrote: I think writers are the most narcissistic people. Well, I mustn’t say this, I like many of them, a great many of my friends are writers.^xii I think writing requires one’s full attention, but for me, that attention and obsession is toward language. As I write, more and more of my cells are replaced by language. When they burn a writer’s body, the smoke will be shaped like letters.

Sometimes writing can feel like digging holes, planting and replanting things that might never turn into anything. My eyes point down when I’m planting, but the breath of something else is always in my ears. Sometimes that breath is mortality. Other times, that breath is history. Sometimes memory. Sometimes the moon. Oftentimes, silence.

Plath said something like this too: I think that personal experience is very important, but certainly it shouldn’t be a kind of shut-box and mirror looking, narcissistic experience. I believe it should be relevant, and relevant to the larger things.^xiii

Dear Teacher, everything you taught me, I took with me. You gave me a flashlight and pointed me to a hole in the ground. But like the best teachers, you didn’t tell me what I’d find there. I kept the flashlight and have been wandering in caverns since then. I haven’t seen the sun since we met. I live on drips of moisture from the earth. I eat leftover snacks from the pockets of dead writers.

Dear Teacher, you had us read so much in such a short period of time. I still remember how we talked about Jeanette Winterson in your class. And how Winterson wrote that the most powerful written work often masquerades as autobiography. That it offers itself as raw when in fact it is sophisticated. That it presents itself as a kind of diary when really it is an oration. I love when Winterson says that the best work speaks intimately to you even though it has been consciously made to speak intimately to thousands of others.^xiv

Now I admire writers who write with an intimate intensity but also a generous capaciousness. I enjoy reading work that expands while it contracts. Writing made by an instrument with a microscope on one end and a telescope on the other, leaving some powder on the page in the form of language.