The Generative Joys of Bookbinding

I was on the roof of my Brooklyn apartment building, in the dark, beating boiled daffodils with a rolling pin, when I had to admit that my path might be a creative, not an academic, one.

I’d been applying to doctoral programs in English lit so I could spend my life reading and writing about great novels. The truth was, I longed to write one of my own, but the idea seemed out of reach. I’d written many things in my life—countless journal entries, , even a short story or two that I stuffed away in a drawer—but I never saw myself as a writer. I was a book lover. A reader, to be sure, but also a true lover of.