Today I am thinking of the word “release” in association with a book going out into the world, and the image that comes to my mind is of a bird loosed and flying free. A wild bird singing and where it lights, nobody knowns, but, please God who watches every sparrow, it will find places to perch along the way.
I am beyond grateful that last night, I was able to be in a bookstore that I love, surrounded by books and people that I care for deeply.
Students came—even a student that I worked with way back in 1995 at the University of Illinois at Chicago, when I was a TA in an American Literature Class, and we read Hawthorne, Dickinson, and Melville, and talked of such things. This lovely student is now a lovely woman, and the mother of three.
And there were students from my most recent Creative Writing Classes–students who show such wonderful promise as writers of fiction and poetry and prose . . . the words and the world at their fingertips.
And my professor came, the person in my doctoral program who most encouraged me as a writer, and whose lucid, succinct comments written in his precise hand in the margins of my papers, first truly revealed to me that writing is a multi-layered conversation—with the manuscript, with the reader, with the self.
Friends–an abundance of friends–were present. How thankful I am for each and every one, who have shared in the journey of words, the journey of release, the journey of life.
And family. My dearest ones, there from beginning to end.