My mother is a teacher of fiction. She has read every novel under the sun. She wrote her master’s thesis at San Francisco State on Mrs. Dalloway while pregnant with [my sister] Emily. To celebrate a poetry publication of mine years ago she sent me a card that read: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”—Joan Didion. At the time I was living in a closet on St. Mark’s Place, and I pinned the card to the crumbling wall to remind me of her support, her thoughtfulness.
But the more I looked at the card, the more it troubled me. My poems didn’t tell stories. I became a poet in part because I didn’t want to tell stories. As far as
