Dear Ms. Willard,
A friend of mine recently loaned me a copy of your novel, Things Invisible to See. I notice that you have the same name as the person who wrote A Visit to William Blake’s Inn: Poems for Innocent and Experienced Travelers. Are you the same person? If so, why do you work in such different genres? Who is your audience?
Sincerely,
A.R.
Dear A.R.,
Yes, the same person wrote the two books you mention, and yes, I am that person. If you happen to run across a collection of poems called Water Walker or another one called Household Tales of Moon and Water, I’ll take responsibility for those, too. Also for a couple of collections of short stories.
To answer your question about working in different genres: each work chooses its own form, and I try to follow its lead—story, poem, novel, or essay. I hope the connections between them are clear. They all come from the same well, a metaphor I don’t take lightly.
When I was growing up in Ann Arbor, Michigan, I heard plenty of stories about folks coming into the world and going out of it and maybe coming back once in a while to keep an eye on us, the living. Call them guardians, ancestors, spirits; they glistened before us in a web of words: their stories were the gifts they handed down to us.
Behind their gifts lay questions: What will you give to those who come after? Who do you want to be?
Why, the village storyteller, of course. The children sit in the front rows, the parents and the grandparents gather in the back. May my story or poem be as lucky as a lost traveler whose road finds him and leads him home. May it delight travelers, like a gift from the ancestors.