Issue 95: Mary Ruefle

RUEFLE

As Keats said, “In order to write poetry, you need a sense of both light and shade.” And he’s absolutely right. Life is tragic—it’s pure unadulterated tragedy—but it’s shot through with moments of joy. Also, we are capable of humor, the human species, and humor is a great mystery to me. It’s an extraordinary balance to the tragedy. I have a terrific sense of humor, and as a writer my sense of humor is going to play into my work. It just is. I think my poems now are not very humorous; I could be wrong. I think humor played a larger part in my work when I was younger. But why? There were more occasions for humor? My irony phase? I don’t know. But I do tend to mix the two. It’s how I see the world, so it’s there in my writing.

BUCKINGHAM

The Book is not less humorous, but maybe a little more muted? The humor is still there, but the tragedy is bigger. One of the poems that does what Kurtis is talking about really beautifully is “The Effusive”: “It’s been a great year. I turned seventy, and my brother shot himself.” Could you talk about the ways in which opposites create humor?

RUEFLE

Yeah, there’s humor in that. Well, again, I think opposites are just a sense of light and shade. You can write a long, heavy-handed tragic poem, and you can write a long, light-as-air hysterically funny poem. But, ultimately, they’re not going to be as rich as if you put a mix of sensibility, a mix of attitude, perhaps, or outlook. It’s more than just a mix of emotion because part of it can be two different ways to view emotion. If you have in your life a year that is a big year—it’s important, significant things happened—that could be a year of good, happiness-producing things occurring, or it could also be a pivotal year in which many tragic things happen. But they’re both significant years. I think it was Toni Morrison—she won the Nobel Prize and then her house burned down, and she lost everything in like a week. Something very similar happened recently to another famous author where these two things collided in a small period of time. That’s the roller coaster of life. Even the shape of a roller coaster, how it goes down, comes up, goes down, comes up. It’s the ride. The whole shape of a roller coaster has a lot to do with what we’re talking about. I think The Book is the most accessible thing I’ve written, and it’s the most autobiographical thing I’ve ever written.

ROOK RAINSDOWNE

Do you have a particular reading practice? How do you decide what to read next, and what are you reading now?

RUEFLE

I’m running out of time to read. I will not live to read all this stuff I want to. I have authors I love—and when I say I love, that means I’ll read anything they wrote. I just picked up two books that I ordered. I never buy books because I don’t have a lifestyle where I can spend money on books, but it doesn’t make any difference because I live near a phenomenal Goodwill. I’m looking at the floor of my study. I think I’ve got about seventy-two books I would like to read but have not read. I’m a huge, huge fan of the great 20th century Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg. Natalia Ginzburg is a god. I’m a huge Robert Walser fan, of the short pieces, and I had just finished a book called Little Snow Landscape. I’ve wanted to read a book called Walks with Walser by Carl Seelig, who was a friend of his. When Walser was living in his last asylum—for the last twenty or twenty-five years of his life, he was not writing—he took long walks, and Carl visited him every day, and they walked. This is his friend’s reminiscing about those walks. For poetry, I just finished what I thought was a phenomenal book—a friend of mine translated it from the French—Every Minute Is First, Marie-Claire Bancquart. I guess that’s kind of weird esoteric stuff, right? I really love this French poet. She died, and this book is the poems she wrote while she was ill and dying in the last two or three years of her life. All three of the books are in translation—one from Italian, one from German, and one from French. I don’t really keep up with what’s au courant. I just don’t have time. You tend to do that when you’re younger. I’m all over the place. I’m looking at an amazing children’s book I absolutely love by the children’s author Jon Klassen called The Skull. It’s a picture book—you know, with big words. I highly recommend it. I’m looking at a biography of Anne Frank. It’s a full biography, and I think it’s the only one. It’s kind of depressing to look at books you know you’ll never read. But I will now turn away and look at the leaves again.

ANDERSON

I’m curious about your ritual or writing process of creating erasures and how that might have changed over time. Does erasure as a practice inspire other work you do, or is it more of a self-enclosed practice?

RUEFLE

It’s a self-enclosed practice, and I now refer to it as my hobby. I’ve never had a hobby, and I think it’s as close as I’ll ever come to one. I don’t write every day, but I do two facing pages of an erasure book every morning, religiously, and I get pissed off if I can’t. It’s something I do that delights me, but it has very much changed. At some point I began to incorporate images so that the images are juxtaposed with the text. So the books are no longer blank pages blacked out, or whited out, or colored out. They still use all those mediums, but, more often than not, there’s an image glued on the page that I have cut from a book or a magazine. I’m working on my 112th book of erasure. My other work does not influence it at all. But it’s my mind and my eye, so it’s hard to say where one ends and one begins. If I do an erasure page and I’m particularly fond of the text and love the words I’ve left on the page, I’ll start a poem. That doesn’t happen very often; they’re very uneven because sometimes I make a mistake and choose a book that the language is not very interesting—I thought it would be, and it’s not. But I do have several poems that originated in an erasure book. I’ll lift a phrase or a sentence, and I’ll either start a poem or use that phrase or sentence in a poem. I’m sure there’s something in Dunce that comes from an erasure page. I couldn’t tell you now; I’d have to sit and read the book, and I don’t want to read the book because I wrote it. I love it when it happens because now I’ve got the beginning of a poem. Anything helps.

BUCKINGHAM

To what extent do surrealist-type techniques play into the practice of writing for you? I’m thinking about things like erasure where you’re leaving things to chance. To what degree is randomness, chance, and serendipity part of the process?

RUEFLE

It’s part of everything I do. It’s also a major part of when I write a poem. Chance is everything. Surprise and chance—you cannot intend them. They’re not an intention. How they enter in is you being in a state where you’re completely open to anything that happens. When I used to teach, and I would be looking at someone’s poem, I could tell when someone was so intent on what their original idea for the poem was that it’s like beating a horse to death. They just drag it. They’re not open to whatever might happen, to some surprising juxtaposition or memory that might suddenly come up in the poem. You need to be in a state of absolute openness and acceptance of it happening. That’s how it happens. You create a state in which it can happen, and sometimes you’ll see a line—in this poem, this imaginary poem I’m thinking of that beats itself to death because it so relentlessly won’t swerve or leave the author’s original intention—you’ll see a really great line. And I will look at that line, and I’ll say, “You see what happened here? I bet you didn’t intend that.” And they’ll go, “No, suddenly that just popped into my head.” And I’ll say, “Well, cut the poem all the way back to that line and see what happens if you follow from there.” Sometimes, a young poet will have an amazing line, and then, instead of following the path where that line leads them, they’ll rein themselves back like, “Whoops, I’m going too far.”

But chance and randomness. That’s in everything I do. Actually, though, I’m consciously choosing in the erasures; they’re not found texts. They’re books I find, and I make the pages. The words I leave on the page are consciously chosen; there’s nothing random about it except, of course, it’s a form, and the form is this: write something, but you can only use all the words on this page. You have to choose words from the words that are in front of you. That’s a restriction, isn’t it? Chance is second nature to me.

LEIM

Are there other rituals that you tend to return to? You note in The Most of It that you read in bed first thing in the morning every thirty or so days for a couple hours. Is that something you try to hold to? Do you have other reading, writing, or even personal rituals you keep?

RUEFLE

Every thirty days, yes. Usually on a Sunday, it said.

RUEFLE

Those were the days. I’m sure I did it. Those were the days. They are over, Keely. They’re over.

LEIM

Sorry to hear it.

RUEFLE

They were nice while it lasted. Wouldn’t that be nice, reading in bed in the morning? Oh, that would be fabulous. Anyway, rituals? I mean, I have rituals, but my rituals don’t have to do with reading and writing. When I think of rituals in my life, I don’t think of reading and writing. For instance, every single
morning that you get up, do you do the same things in the first thirty minutes? The identical things?

LEIM

It depends on how many kids are asking for help.

RUEFLE

Oh, how many kids do you have?

LEIM

Four, but generally, yes. More or less, generally, yes.

RUEFLE

Keely, wow. You are a brave, brave soul. Yeah, reading in bed in the morning, that must have blown you away. Who could? I’m taking care of two people now, so I know what you go through. But no, I tend to do the same thing every morning when I wake up, and it’s kind of boring: I boil the water to make coffee, I fill the dog’s water bowl, I make sure that the vase with flowers has enough water, what plants need watering. If it’s in the winter, I cut back the wicks of the candles because I burn candles at night in the winter, but not in the summer. And then, I have to do something else. And I do the same thing every morning. This is the morning ritual. These are the things I do. It’s very repetitive, but is that a ritual? I don’t know. What’s a ritual? I go to the same food markets on the same day of the week every week. I’m one of those people. I go Mondays and Wednesdays, that’s it. You ask me to go to the grocery store on a Friday, and I would say, “I can’t. It’s not Monday or Wednesday.” I go to one store on Monday and another store on Wednesday. To me, those are rituals. None of them have to do with reading and writing, but that’s okay. I like ordinary life, you know? So do your children have rituals? Rituals are really important, really important. And writers have rituals. But I can’t think of any that I have. I’m not a person who can write in public. I can’t write in a café. I’m not a café person. I mean, even if I live near one, I’m not. You know? I can’t think of any writing rituals. The ritual in the morning is the erasure. That’s the closest I have to a writing ritual, doing the two pages of erasure in the morning.

BUCKINGHAM

There’s one poem in The Book, your Elizabeth Bishop poem, where you tell us in the back of the book that you sat and wrote this thing during an art installation, and then you stopped writing it when the installation was over and you left. William Stafford in the last year or so of his life said he didn’t really rewrite anymore. I wonder how you feel about the rough edges of poetry and how much they show through as an aesthetic.

RUEFLE

I like rough edges. I’m not someone who writes professionally polished poems, but I also don’t rewrite very much. I edit my poems. Editing is simple. I never know what people mean by edit, rewrite, or revision. To me, editing is, you get rid of a comma, you cross out a line, you change the title, you change a word. That’s simple. Rewrite: I rewrite sentences. I’m not an experienced prose writer, but the joy of the English sentence is how many different ways you can say the same thing. It’s mind-boggling. So the more prose I write, I do rewrite sentences and try to say the same thing in a different way. I guess that would be rewriting. But revision is a whole different ball game. And I do all of them, and also there are poems where I don’t. For me revision is major. Revision is when you write something and you get rid of 75% of it, and what started to be about a frog ends up to be a political poem. That’s revision. “Oh, look. I liked this line, where this was going. So let me get rid of these two pages and go back and go an entirely different direction that this line I’m keeping hinted at.” That’s revision. Revision is radical. It’s radical. Editing is isolated changes that you see at a glance, and rewriting is trying to say the exact same thing in a different way, using a different syntax and using different words. But revision is a whole new vision of a work. They’re all interesting. I like doing them all. But do I really? There are poems I have in books that I didn’t change a word from the time it went on the page. There are those too. I’m not someone who swears by one or the other. You do what’s necessary given the piece of writing in front of you.

EBELING

I was recently at Community of Writers where Matthew Zapruder gave a talk about creating community and keeping correspondence through letters with fellow poets. He mentioned you as somebody he likes to write letters to. Do you find a similar kind of value in correspondence or letter writing?

RUEFLE

I love writing letters. It’s actually my favorite literary form. I’m a voracious letter writer. I correspond with twelve people. It’s becoming harder and harder the less time I have. These are letters I type on a typewriter. Envelopes, stamps, all that stuff. It’s a major part of my world. Major. I know your generation doesn’t write letters anymore, but as writers you should try it because usually you end up liking it a lot. Writing letters to other writers is a sense of community. I don’t live near any of my writer friends. None of them are in this town. I have friends here, but they’re not writers. So that’s a way to keep in touch with my writer friends because they’re all over the country. And I don’t live in a city, so I don’t go to readings or whatever writers do in the city. I don’t do any of that. I don’t have a community of writers. I do not belong to a community of writers. I did when I was teaching because I had my colleagues, but I don’t teach anymore. So I use letters, I suppose. I’m kind of a loner and a recluse more than anything else.

I just like writing letters. I like reading letters, reading the letters of an author I love. Or just reading old letters. I like to collect old letters written by strangers, people I don’t know. Sometimes, I have friends who are getting rid of things, like I have a friend who gave me a whole batch of letters that were written by her grandparents and great-grandparents, and she didn’t want to keep them, but she knew I like letters and enjoy reading them. When you read letters and also diaries and journals, what sinks in is life was pretty much the same. People are always talking about the weather. That doesn’t change. Going here, going there, someone got sick, someone died, what the weather’s like. And postcards. History of the world through postcards. Wow. The postage stamp was invented in 1847. I love stamps. It’s an important part of my life. I like books, I like letters, I love movies.

BUCKINGHAM

I’m really charmed by your writing about friends, and not just the importance of friendship but that they’re the characters who people a lot of your work. Would you talk about that, especially that long poem about the friends in The Book?

RUEFLE

I consider it an essay, but you can call it whatever you want. We too often take our friends for granted. And my friends are my community. That’s my lifeline. In today’s world, spouses and lovers can come and go, but friends ultimately don’t. The nature of the relationship is different. When you’re in college and you meet people, it never occurs to you that you will still be meeting them fifty years from now. And I say that emotionally because tonight, my best friend from college is coming to visit, and we met fifty years ago. We’ve known each other since we were, what, twenty? And we’re now in our seventies. That’s pretty incredible. And eventually in life you have friends who remember your parents who are long dead. Her parents aren’t living, my parents aren’t living. She knew my parents, I knew her parents. You meet and make friends constantly, but it’s the really old ones who remember all sorts of parts of your life that a new friend can’t remember. Friends are so important. I love my friends. And I have young friends too. I make new friends sometimes and think, oh I have enough friends, I don’t need any more friends, and then . . . A young poet and his partner moved into town, and we became friends. Of course, they didn’t last very long, they live in Seattle now, but it just happened. It just happened. I don’t know how it happens, but it’s one of the miracles of life. Friendship. So keep making friends.

LEIM

You’ve lived all over the country in both rural and urban settings, and I heard that you lived for a while as a caretaker of a farm. Could you speak to these sorts of places and how they’ve shaped your life and your writing?

RUEFLE

My father was in the military and so we moved every few years; we lived all over. I never had a community—I was constantly changing schools, changing friends—and never lived near grandparents, saw them once every three years. So that’s a life in itself, right? I went to college in Vermont, and I didn’t want to move anymore. I didn’t want to leave anymore. I liked it here, and I wanted to stay. I was becoming seduced by the natural world. And after some very difficult years, I lucked out and got a job caretaking an estate that had belonged to Robert Frost called The Gully. I was there for ten years. And then my life destabilized again. I lived in China for a year as I couldn’t get any jobs in this country because I don’t have an MFA or anything.
They needed English teachers. And I’ve taught at universities in different cities in the United States. But my home has always been here in southern Vermont, in a very small, boring town. I like small, boring towns. Many people think they like them, and they try living in them and they go nuts, like my friends who had to leave after a year. They’re in Seattle, and they’re happy. I’ve lived many different places here, from this grand estate to an apartment that had holes in the floor where you could see the snow underneath the house. There was no insulation and the heat didn’t work. And then I lived in an apartment I was very fond of, but it was in a very bad section of town. I did come to feel a great deal of solidarity with the street I lived on. It was an education in itself. But then I was able to buy a home. I’m only a quarter mile from the old apartment, but I’m surrounded by trees, and I don’t have a neighbor on the left or the right, only behind me. I’m downtown in a small, boring town, but I’m not surrounded by other buildings. It took me a long time to find this particular place.

LEIM

Do you feel like these places have shaped your writing?

RUEFLE

No, not really. The place that shapes my work is my imagination. I have to live in my imagination because I never had much stability. You can nail me as a poet who lives in New England because of the flora and fauna. Ultimately, when we talk about poets of place, all that means is that the flora and fauna and animals in their poems are the flora and fauna and animals of where they live. That’s all it means, really. So there’s not a lot of cactus in my poems because I don’t live in Arizona. There’s an awful lot of deer and maple trees.

I never had any roots, and that has shaped me as a rootless drifter who then is forced inward. I make my home wherever I go, but I have lived here now for half a century. I’ve gone away a lot, but I always maintained a base here in Vermont. If I’m traveling and I reenter my state and I cross the state line, I beep my horn. I’m home. But I don’t know where I live. I honestly don’t. I think I live in my mind. Yeah, I live in my mind.

RAINSDOWNE

I’ve been reading some poets lately who seem to have an enduring imaginative place in their imagination. Is there an enduring place you return to in your mind?

RUEFLE

Isn’t that what memory is? Memories are an enduring place in your mind you return to, and they’re entirely imaginary. As you should know by now, your memory is very different from someone else’s memory of the identical event. You’ll reach a point where people will have a memory of you that you have no memory of. Everyone’s memory is different. I have very humorous memories of fantastically fun and funny things I did with friends, and I also have tragic memories. And they come and go. You never know when your memory is going to be a happy one or a sad one because, believe me, they come out of nowhere. They can be horrible or they can be wonderful. So we go back to the roller coaster.

I’ll tell you an interesting thing about aging. All my friends who are my age, we all agree on this. It’s really spooky, guys. As you age, when you become elderly, you have an onslaught of childhood memories that you’ve never had before. It’s uncanny. Childhood memories you’ve never had before come back, on top of the ones that you’ve had your whole life, but there’s a whole new slew of them. I have more childhood memories now than I’ve ever had. It wasn’t anything I particularly paid attention to when I was younger because you’re too busy making memories when you’re young. You’re making them, you’re making memories. But when you’re old, let’s face it, you’re not making memories because you’re not going to live to have those memories. So you guys, you get out there, and you get busy making memories. That’s my advice. Make those memories

ANDERSON

You once said you don’t think about the reader when writing. In light of your poem “The Perfect Reader” from your Selected Poems, how do you keep the reader out of your mind when writing? Do you write to an ideal reader?

RUEFLE

I don’t think of the reader when I’m writing a poem at all. I do think of the reader when I’m writing a prose essay because they’re very different things. If I’m writing prose, I’m engaging in public discourse; I’m using the language of public discourse, which is prose. I’m speaking to you in it now. But when I’m writing a poem, it’s just my inner life. It’s just me. I’m not speaking for all poets, and I think I’ve gone on record as saying I don’t. Why would I care what other people think about my inner life? I’m not thinking of other people when I write poems. With prose I do. Madness, Rack, and Honey very much had the reader in mind because they’re lectures I’m giving to a group of people, and I’m terribly aware that I’m going to be standing in front of
an audience. Who do I write for? I write for the Agitator of the Soul, who’s often myself and sometimes a stranger.

LEIM

This qualification between poetry and prose is a helpful one; nevertheless, you do have a lot of readers. In light of this, what posture do you think, or hope, a reader may take with your work? Like a posture of credulity, skepticism, or humorous engagement?

RUEFLE

I just want to make my readers smile. That’s all. No more, no less. And you have me, but I don’t have you. You say, “I have readers.” Readers have me because they have my books, but I don’t have readers because I don’t have my readers. I’m always completely blown away that I have readers because I’m looking around, and I don’t see them. They’re not part of my daily life. But if you have books in your house or apartment or your backpack or your purse, then you’re carrying the work of another mind with you.

This is a tradition that has been going on for a very long time, this writing. And I’m just carrying it on, that’s all I’m doing. And I’m proud to have spent my life carrying it on, for better or for worse. Then it just gets passed on. It doesn’t stop with me; it doesn’t stop with anyone. It just keeps going on, and we all float into oblivion. But there’s always another generation coming along carrying the tradition on, and that’s a beautiful thing. That’s what you have to have faith and believe in. You’re carrying on a tradition. But, yeah, I don’t walk around thinking, oh I have a lot of readers. I mean, I never do. And if people point it out to me, I’m often surprised because, I don’t know, it’s surprising to me.

BUCKINGHAM

I love that you say this. The title poem in The Book is really about you being a reader and finding the book that was written just for you. It coincides with what you’re saying, and it’s really beautiful.

RUEFLE

If anyone in the whole world would ever have that feeling reading a book by me, I would have served my purpose. I have made someone smile or cry. Literature’s a lot bigger than we are. It’s huge and we are just tiny specks, just like in the universe we are tiny specks. And then within the tiny speck, we have this other thing called literature. It really is a cult. Your average American would rather go out and do something that’s their idea of fun than stay home and read a book. That’s just a fact. I would rather stay home and read a book. But it is what it is. My whole life geared me in this direction, I guess. I must have fallen in love deeply with reading as a child. I found other people who were lonely too, and they were all in books.

We write as much for the dead as we do for the living. It’s like saying, “Thank you for being there for me when I needed you. Let me write you a letter by writing a book of poems. Even though you’re dead.” Issa is one of my favorite poets. Tons of humor in Issa, and sadness. I’m always sort of saying, “Hi, Issa! Hello out there!”

BUCKINGHAM

Do you have a translation you like better than others? Of Issa?

RUEFLE

No, I just have a lot of haiku books, all different translations of his. A great haiku place to start is that book by Robert Hass, The Essential Haiku. That’s a great book. I recommend that to all of you because he really goes out of his way to show they’re not all the same. Haiku, they’re very distinct personalities. We tend to lump it all together like, “Oh, a haiku is a haiku is a haiku.” But in fact, every great haiku master is absolutely identifiable and different with their own sensibility. In schools today, we lump things together like “women writers” or “gay writers” or “black writers” or “Asian writers” as if they’re all the same. They’re made up of distinct, individual voices, distinct individual experiences and voices, and no two are alike. I don’t like it when they’re all lumped together like that because they’re made up of individuals, that’s all. Toni Morrison does not read like James Baldwin, two phenomenal writers and they couldn’t be more different.

EBELING

Your last seven or so books were published by Wave Books. I’m wondering about your relationship with them, how they found you or how you found them.

RUEFLE

I love Wave. Wave Books changed my life. They’re like a family to me. It’s a very small press, with four or five people in the office. I have an excellent relationship with my editor, Joshua Beckman, who is a phenomenal poet in his own right. And how did they find me? Joshua found me. I can tell you the story of how it happened. I had been doing erasure for a very long time, and I had never read from an erasure book in front of an audience. I don’t do it anymore, but I had never done it, and I was reading in New York, and I took a deep breath, and I said, “Well, this is weird, but I have this erasure book, and I’m going to read it.” He was in the audience, and he loved it. Wave Books had just started. He had just begun to work there as an editor, and he asked if they could publish it. I was thrilled. Little White Shadow was my first book with Wave, and then I went over to
them for everything. I’m very, very happy. I couldn’t have asked for a better home for my work. We found each other at the right moment because Joshua had just found Wave, Wave had just found him, he had just found me, I had just found him. It all worked out. It just happened. It just happened. If he hadn’t been at the reading, would it have ever happened? I don’t know. If I hadn’t been invited to read there, would it ever have happened? I don’t know. It’s a small, tiny enough press where there’s individual attention paid to manuscripts in a way that I had never experienced, people honestly giving me feedback. Because I’m someone who loves feedback. I’m not someone who’s hurt by it, and I never had it, so I found it really helpful. But the trick is you have to have someone who you really trust, someone whose sensibility is the same as yours because if you get someone whose sensibility is completely different, then you’re just going to lock horns.

LEIM

In Madness, Rack, and Honey, you have a quotation that has stuck with me for years now. “Every time I read a poem, I’m willing to die insofar as I’m surrendering myself to the mercy of someone else’s speech, and I do not want to die in the presence of someone else’s vile corruption of feeling. You are supposed to be preparing me for my death.” In light of this, could you elaborate on what you consider a poet’s job to be?

RUEFLE

I think the only general job a poet has is to keep the tradition going within their lifetime, using their vernacular. Using their vernacular in their lifetime and then passing it on. That’s ultimately their job, to carry on the tradition of literature. That’s a general statement, but that’s the only statement I can think of that would encompass everyone. It’s not really a job. It’s a vocation. And notice that word vocation: vocal, vocabulary. It’s an inner vocation more than a job. Your inner vocation dictates to you what it is you’ll be doing. And what one person is doing is not what another person is going to be doing. You know, there’s a lot of trash out there. And I don’t want to spend my time reading it. And that’s not because I’m mean, it’s because I don’t have time. Life is short. It grows shorter every year of your life. It doesn’t mean I only like heavy-handed serious stuff. Of course not. I love Robert Walser. How lighthearted can you get? Reading him is like drinking champagne—I think William Gass said that. But I don’t know. I don’t have a clue. I wish I could help you, but I don’t have a clue what my job is.

LEIM

Okay, so to rephrase, how do you hope you might prepare us for our deaths?

RUEFLE

Making you smile. Making you smile. Anyone who can smile in the face of death has the right attitude. And it ain’t easy. To prepare you. I don’t want you to be afraid of being stupid. I don’t want you to be afraid of being embarrassed. I don’t want you to be afraid that you’re missing out on something because everyone is, and no one is. I want you to wake up to the wonders of the world that are all around you. There’s all this stuff that’s going on now, all you have to do is read the newspapers. It’s so disheartening. It’s frightening, what’s going on in the world today. Nationally and internationally. And I do keep up with it. Sometimes it’s more than I can bear, and I have to go into a room and close the door and read a book and remind myself that people were always troubled.

Find something that you love to do. That’s the important thing in every life. I don’t care what it is so long as it doesn’t hurt other people. And even if it’s just a hobby and you have another life, that hobby can keep you going. There’s someone who might be miserable in their job, but they really really love building miniature airplanes on the weekend and that makes them happy. That’s a beautiful thing. For me, it’s reading and writing, and it always has been.

If you’re going to dedicate your life to this, it’s not easy. It’s a challenge, and it’s going to be difficult. Don’t be afraid of the difficulty. Keep going. Above all, patience. Patience is what every writer needs, endless patience, because you only learn by doing, and it takes a lot of doing. You need patience. And if for any reason at all, you feel you one day want to stop and do something else, don’t ever ever ever feel bad about that decision or ashamed
in some way because everything is ultimately connected. Your journey is unpredictable, and it may be that getting an MFA led you slowly in this other direction. And that’s a beautiful thing too. Who knows? Nobody knows. I have encountered too many younger writers who were really frustrated and there were some who persisted and some who gave up and they both have meaningful lives. They have meaningful lives. One’s not better than the other. Follow the dictates of your heart, and, remember, mind and heart are interchangeable.