These days I think of my teachers. On the poems of Emily Dickinson, beautiful and true and transparent. On the Brontë, laughing as the three of them (and their brother) create a world from scratch in Haworth’s cold dining room and fill page after page with tiny print like the trail of a centipede. On Sylvia Platy in his poems, so crude that they are like eating the heart of a sacred animal. On Annie Dillard’s Mantises, guardians of texts as near and far as looking at a drop of water under a microscope. On Virginia Woolf, that I wrote standing up, because writing doesn’t have to be an easy task. In the false delicacy of Mercè Rodoreda, that hides salamanders among the flowers. In the thirty-two cruel but strangely emotional tales of Flannery O’Connor (and of Victor Catalan, who could be your cousin).
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