![]() (It was, in part, her beautiful life, and her sudden, untimely death that inspired me to write my first book, Love Letters to the Dead.)Īfter a lot of growing up (stories for another time), I got my undergraduate degree at the University of Chicago, and then received my MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, (where I lived on the bottom floor of a farm house once occupied by Kurt Vonnegut!). I thought about all of the things that I loved about her, all the fun stuff we did together, and finally I settled on, “I like my Mom because she gave birth to me.” That just seemed the most basic. I remember it vividly because it was my first awareness of that space between a feeling and the language we have to name it. ![]() I like kittens because they are soft.” And then I wrote, “I like my Mom-” but I couldn’t come up with an end to the sentence. I started out pretty unassumingly: “I like rainbows because they are pretty. ![]() I had been assigned to write a poem about the things I liked and why. My first memory of writing is as a 2nd grader. One of my first memories is of looking out the window of the black Cadillac that my family drove across the wide-open desert when we moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, which is where I grew up, and where my sister and I spent countless summer afternoons making fairy potions, battling evil witches, and playing other imaginary games that probably contributed to my proclivity to make up stories. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |