Where Truth Meets Fiction

"Recently I was going through some of the poetry I wrote as a teen, and truly there’s some pitiful stuff. So sentimental and sloppy and overcooked and romantic, and yet, there it sits in the high school magazine, alongside the work of my genuinely genius brother (number one at Radnor, tops at Princeton, a soaring PhD from Stanford), not to mention David Brooks of Bobos in Paradise fame. There it was, somehow earning me the community poet award, the night just before graduation. I was given gifts as an aspiring young poet—more than my poetry ever actually deserved. Mostly it was this gift of learning to believe in myself so that I would keep working at this thing called writing, keep testing myself, keep reading the works of others, keep trying, until I could get some part of it right. I was emboldened by others. I learned to persevere. And because of this, I found a way to make language my ally, to emerge in the world as myself."

— from my talk yesterday to the gracious, intelligent, and warmly inviting women of Bryn Mawr Presbyterian Church