ITS BEEN so very long since I’ve posted here. Apologies.
I’m going to try to do a quick update of some pieces in the next few days.
I always enjoy working with Joe Wakelee-Lynch at LMU magazine. He enjoys knocking ideas around, the more abstract, the better. That gives the writer a lot of room to roam and daydream.
This piece was one of three I pitched. I had some stray seedlings of ideas swirling around in my head. I’d told him about another couple of pieces I’d been working on that felt a bit like archeology. He liked the idea of going back to foundational texts. During the first months of the pandemic, I found myself revisiting certain themes or authors (not necessarily the book that was on the syllabus or the very book I had once spent a summer with), but the re-reading took me back to the person who started out on this journey to be a writer.
It was an important journey and it has been wonderful to be in conversation with other people about their own foundational reading lists, their own “shelves of selves”
You can read the piece here with the most gorgeous illustrations by the amazing artist Melinda Beck. She captured the feeling of what it is to collage together a life of words.
native to the place 
Hmmm, I’m not finding the link to your article 🤔
Thanks! Fixed. Had a broken link in there.
It was worth the wait! I had to go check, but my blue Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry is still on the shelf where it should be. It’s downstairs between Robert W. Service and Dylan Thomas, not in the dining room with the shelf of poetry.
I love it! These books are such important building blocks.