Interviewing the Master

It's got to be eight years now since a single email from the National Endowment for the Arts changed my life by introducing me to Alyson Hagy. Like others that year, we'd won a grant, and we'd been encouraged to reach out to one another. I sent an email, as I recall, that made some reference to Ken Kalfus' work. Alyson wrote back.

We've met each other twice in the meantime, but the correspondence lives—the emails that go back and forth, the packages that arrive via regular US mail (a candle, a bookmark, a handwoven book), the stories she tells (about, say, a robin in snow or a package tucked under a bridge) extending the range of my thinking. Alyson is enormously smart and book talented, tough minded but also kind. The sort of person who wins teaching awards at the University of Wyoming and takes them so entirely in stride that I learn about them long afterwards, by accident.

Good things ought to come to people like Alyson, and in early March they are. Michael Ondaatje, author of ENGLISH PATIENT, RUNNING IN THE FAMILY, ANIL'S GHOST, (oh, and incidentally, my favorite living author), is coming to her town to speak, and Alyson will not simply serve as one of his hosts; she'll be the one doing the big interview—just Alyson and Ondaatje on a stage before hundreds, talking origins, framing, poetry, challenge. I can't think of anyone who would do this job more meticulously than Alyson—can't think of a conversation I'd rather listen in on.

There will be power, come March 4, on a stage in Laramie. A match will be struck, a flame will burn, and a tendril of something new and daring will rise up from the smoke.