Notre Dame knows. She whispers to me across the centuries and miles that when you are incinerated from the outside in, and nothing remains but scattered rubble, defaced artwork, and statues that weep gray lines of soot, that each of us can act, maybe even collectively, to make possible the unthinkable. We can receive the power and possibility to wipe away the ashes, put together that which has been shattered, act with love and, like Our Lady of Renewal, once again gleam.
Do you remember a language older
than time, when a shiver down my mother’s
spine was worth a thousand words
and the melancholy in my father’s eyes,
reflecting Lake Geneva, was indecipherable?
There, unbeknownst to me
in a world inhabited by swans,
I too swim in concentric circles
to find the resonance of my core
and discover that in dreaming
lies the healing of earth. In dreaming
we travel to a place where all is forgiven.
In dreaming is the Divine created.
Before writing, poetry was the oral tradition. The poet, historian, held the knowledge of where the people came from. Was second only to the king. The poet makes or breaks one by recounting exploits or failures. Who are William Dawes and Samuel Prescott? They strode alongside Paul Revere on Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s famous midnight ride yet went unmentioned in the poem. Sixteen-year-old Sybil Ludington rode twice as far that night doing the same, but her name is less illustrious because no one wrote a poem about her. In 1821’s “The Defence of Poetry" Shelley claimed "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world".
Villa Albertine · 972 5th Avenue · New York, NY
I'm grateful for the wonderful booksellers I work with. We're a small team, but everyone contributes their own vision for the store. I'm also grateful that Albertine is able to thrive and host events and experiment, thanks to the support of the Institut français and my colleagues at the Villa Albertine.
As for what makes me happy, I work right next to Central Park. When the weather is warm, I can go sit in the sun in the park on my lunch break and I feel like the luckiest person in the world.
Journalist · Social Worker · Author of Smacked: A Story of White-Collar Ambition, Addiction, and Tragedy
My most well-known work is probably the story I wrote for The New York Times upon which my memoir Smacked is based, and that process was unique because it was almost a cathartic unloading and exploration (of addiction of loved ones) I needed and wanted to do. It was a pleasure to write that, because I needed to do it so badly. For the novel I'm now working on, I find that when I'm starting a new chapter and thinking about these characters I've been living with for a while now, it helps if I get out in nature and take a walk or a hike and just put myself in the character's shoes for a little while, think about what they are going to say, who they'll speak with, what they will do. And then I get home and jot down all those thoughts, and use those notes later to write the chapter.
The Creative Process: Podcast Interviews & Portraits of the World’s Leading Authors & Creative Thinkers
Inspiring Students – Encouraging Reading - Connecting through Stories
The Creative Process exhibition is traveling to universities and museums. The Creative Process exhibition consists of interviews with over 100 esteemed writers, including Joyce Carol Oates, Hilary Mantel, Neil Gaiman, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Tobias Wolff, Richard Ford, Junot Díaz, Marie Darrieussecq, Michel Faber, T.C. Boyle, Jay McInerney, George Saunders, Geoff Dyer, Etgar Keret, Douglas Kennedy, Sam Lipsyte, and Yiyun Li, among others. Artist and interviewer: Mia Funk.
