Gifted

Once, when writing the preface to a book of poems written by young writers I'd been teaching, I wrote: "You measure good writing by any number of criteria—by the accretion of telling details, by the ingenuity of the narrator's voice, by the pizzazz of dialogue, by the you-know-them-when-you-see-them signs of originality. We come to value, in good writers, so much more. Exuberance and compassion. Reliability and audacity...."

I was thinking about this yesterday after I discovered a fat package in my mailbox, return address naming Rahna Reiko Rizzuto. Reiko is the author of the extraordinary, American Book Award winning WHY SHE LEFT US. She is also one of my dearest friends—has been since our essays appeared together in MOTHERS WHO THINK—and when I saw the package, I had this mind-trip moment of remembering all the gifts she's ever sent me. A paper vase from Japan. A piece of jade from Hong Kong. A pair of earrings. It goes on. She's the sort of person who fills an afternoon in New York City with detours into niches I'd never know existed. Also the sort who listens brilliantly, and calms you with her words. She's a fantastic writer, ask anyone. But she is also so much more, and it is the more of Reiko that I think of first—the who she is trumping the what she writes, but also, of course, creating the frame in which she writes.

There were bookmarks from Japan in Reiko's package—they sit here now, on my shelf. And then there was DIVISADERO, Michael Ondaatje's newest book. I'd read it, of course (I've read every last Ondaatje word), but I didn't, as her note said, have a copy inscribed to me, which this one was. Jetlagged, just a few hours off the plane from Japan, she'd gone to see this great author read. She'd waited in line. She'd bought me his book.

Writing is impossibly hard; we all know that. There are those who make the journey sound. Reiko is one of those.

(Photo above: Reiko to the right, and our families, at Hawk Mountain.)