Why I Write: The Warp and Weft

When I was 4, my mother taught me to read and write. Every afternoon, we would sit on the couch, side by side, with a black and white marbled composition book propped between us. Cocooned in maternal love, I learned phonetic families: cat, bat, mat; it, hit, bit. Using the words I could spell, together my mother and I made up little stories. Within a few months, I was reading independently. Magic—with my nose in a book, the heat of a summer afternoon or the tedium of a rainy one disappeared.

For many years, I had no interest in my own writing: What could I say that would be as exciting as Mary Lennox's adventures in The Secret Garden? Still a seed must have been germinating. Shoots poked up in

adolescence when, like many girls of my era, I began a diary. By my era, I mean before cell phones, with long stretches during which children and parents were out of touch and teens commonly assumed adults were best evaded. Diary as confidante, I could grapple with the guilt about the friend I no longer wanted to sit with at lunch or the hurt about the one who hadn't invited me to sleep over. I could witness my mind working and then lock the pages with a little silver key.

Not until a wild boy introduced me to the Beat poets did it occur to me that my scribblings might be crafted. Crafted so there was a narrator who could be any variation of me and not-me. Crafted, as I learned my first semester at college, into puzzle-like forms—sonnets, sestinas, villanelles—that could both crystallize and contain emotions.

It was during this time of counting syllables and tapping emphases that I had my first experience with writing on a larger canvas. Craving air away from the cloistered and privileged university (a girl in my dorm had arrived on a private jet), I accompanied a group of students to visit a nearby draconian prison. We were forbidden to bring wri