Tonight I'm Honoring Some Mega Flying Writer Friends

and I'm beginning with Katrina Kenison, who took a virtual walk with me this afternoon (we were on the phone; we live many states apart; I walked by this stream; I took a picture. Snap.). Katrina's newest book, The Gift of an Ordinary Day, came out this past fall and has been doing what thoughtful books do, over time—which is to say that it has been gaining momentum. Visit Katrina's web site. Watch the video she's made. Let her tell you about the life she has been living. You'll see why her book is touching so many lives, and why it's likely on its way to becoming a word-of-mouth bestseller.

I'm moving next to Rebecca Skloot, whom I met years ago at Goucher College, when she was teaching, and her dad, Floyd, was teaching, and I was teaching—and it just went down like that: teachers teaching. Rebecca was talking even then about a book that she was writing, something, she kept saying, about the immortal cells of a woman named Henrietta Lacks. We talked about structure in the abstract back then, and over the next many years I either heard first-hand or read (on Rebecca's blog) about the journey she was taking with a book she so believed in that no amount of raised eyebrow on the part of ersatz publishers had the power to diminish. Rebecca had a story to tell. She had a story that defined her and defined us and had, she knew, to be told. She was in New York City writing, she was in her beat-up Honda driving, she was at a friend's farmhouse revising: Wherever she was, she was determined to get this story told.

You've heard of that Henrietta Lacks story in the meantime, right? You've heard Rebecca on ABC News, Rebecca on Fresh Air, Rebecca on All Things Considered. You've seen Rebecca in the pages of Oprah and let's not forget Rebecca three times in one week in the New York Times or Rebecca on her four-month book tour. We're talking about that Rebecca Skloot, my friends. The one who never stopped believing in her dream.

Finally, I am shouting out today on behalf of one of my very dearest friends, Alyson Hagy. We won a National Endowment for the Arts grant years ago. We started a correspondence. We're in touch, because I'm lucky, nearly every day, and Alyson has seen me through thick and thin, she has sent me her weather via email, she has cheered me through teaching because she's a teacher herself (the likes of whom Michael Ondaatje, Don DeLillo, Phillip Gourevitch, Joy Williams, and Edward Jones come to visit), and she has sent me early pages of her books to read because I so believe in her. Alyson's Ghosts of Wyoming came out a few days ago. It's already been featured, brilliantly, in the Boston Globe, The Believer, New West, and Denver Post, and do you want to know what Susan Salter Reynolds of the LA Times said about my friend Alyson this weekend? Do you?

Reynolds said this: These eight burnished stories confirm Hagy's importance in American literature; her seamless blending of landscape and lives, her very modern understanding of the vulnerability of kindness.

Yeah, baby. Oh, yeah.