One of the best moments in a teacher’s life is the one where you walk into the only half-filled classroom (yay…less grading!) and you meet yourself, that student who is avoiding her homework because of the overwhelming compulsion to write. That student for whom a brain is like a boxcar for every emotion she has experienced. Half-full of pre-memories and stalled on the tracks blocking a line of cars on Main Street. Fragmented like these last two sentences.
She is that student who is not only willing to enter the timeless zone, she has already, against all advice, set up permanent residency there. She knows an MFA is impractical, that she’ll probably teach, but for now the thrill of creating keeps her listening in the dead, winter air for those premises and prompts that illuminate somewhere behind the blackest part of her eyes, urging her, driving her to write, to create.
I don’t want her to ever lose that.
My Writing Life 