It feels very much like bragging to say I’ve so far had lunch with Claire Davis, dinner with Molly Gloss, and lunch with Omar El Akkad. But there, I’ve done it. Saturday, Claire and I talked about what book covers can do to reveal a book or damage its sales. Molly and I talked about the program and our writing. Sunday at lunch, Omar and one of his students and I talked about Portland, fire and how wealth insulates some people even from disaster while leaving others homeless, and that the best Indian food he ever had was while appearing at an event in Iceland. We talked about food. He asked about my novel, would I tell about it? Well. You know the answer.

In her craft talk yesterday morning, Ellen Bass in “Juxtaposition Exercises” demonstrated how friction—of image, idea, words—can startle the reader, demand attention, create surprise, flip what we know on its head, lead even to epiphany. As we read a poem unsure about where it is going, what it means, how it will conclude, uncertainty focuses our attention. She shared a long quote from Picasso, which reminds us not to hold back what we love, to put everything we have in our art. “It’s in the act of writing that we discover the poem.” She reminds us of the truth that we will never have our writing practice fully figured out because “every poem is practice for the next poem.” I came away with the exercises of her title, and with an eagerness to make friction.

Apricot Irving in “Point of View in Memoir” not only described standing under that same linden tree that morning but shared examples of how point of view has been used by memoir. I was intrigued, maybe even a little skeptical at the start. How could memoir be written in anything but first person? But then she used examples of second person in Edwidge Danticat’s Krick? Krack! and Mary Karr and Ta-Nahesi Coates’s Between the World and Me, all of which I’ve read, and there it was: “you.” That point of view allows the writer to speak directly to a parent or a child, to a younger self. I was a believer by the time she shifted to examples of third person, Maxine Hong Kingston in Woman Warrior and West with the Sun by Beryl Markham, two more memoirs I have known and loved. Third person lifts the view to a distance, for the self to become character. I had not even noticed most of these point of view shift, but that is the way of good writing. Verb tense? Point of view? We mostly do not notice when used by capable hands.

Claire Davis, my only mentor from my time who is still in the program, took us to “Deep Imagining, or ‘Your Brain Is Wider than the Sky’.” [the quote is Emily Dickenson] She urged us to find a “deeper level of dreaming on the page.” She demonstrated this in her introduction of walking her dogs by the river, which led to the history and geography, to a wide range of associated memories and emotions. Dwell in the quiet of your story, she suggests, instead of rushing forward. The horizontal movement we are so eager to chase to the end needs a breath. Spend time in the vertical, the heights and depths of where the character is. What connections of nation, politics, landscape culture, family? How might backstory, recent and distant history and memory enrich the reader’s experience? “Don’t move on, move in.” Takes risks, drift off topic—it can all be cut in revision, but it’s better to have more on the page, too much, than to have too little. “Sit still long enough to hear what the story is telling you.”

At the third evening of faculty readings, I was honored to introduce Joseph Millar, Valerie Laken, and Mary Helen Stefaniak. Joe read new poems, so new they might not even be in his newest poetry collection, SHINE, due out this coming October. Valerie read a story about a couple grappling with both age and the devastating consequences of an auto accident that has left the husband in permanent pain and cost his wife a leg. Mary Helen read prescient story about four retirees playing cards in person in a Florida of the future where drowning high rise condominiums are repurposed as assisted living homes for those who aren’t expected to need them for too long.

You had to be there.

I was barely functioning on Sunday with only three hours of sleep. [I want eight.] I wrote and read, I went for a run early. Between each talk and the readings, I lay down, I napped. I missed my husband. It’s been a decade or more since I last slept alone.

This morning, it’s Monday, day 4, as I type with seven hours sleep, I haven’t even had my coffee, the water boiled away and I remembered it in time (I hope), so that I will send this out, have my two cups of coffee, and go for my run.