I had these examples, this gift, given by my mother, by Miss Tynes in our fourth-grade classroom full of our drawings and plaster sculptures, our paintings and stitcheries. By Stravinsky, by the hands of the old masters translated into light projected on the walls of our house in Tucson so many years ago. By Little Miss Sunbeam, that polished prodigy; by Judy Garland’s visibly broken heart, the microphone cord tossed over her narrow shoulder as if she could do anything casually; by Miss Stephanie; by the loony old man building his grottoes of broken glass and pottery shards in the Valley of the Moon. By Dick Shelton, and Lois thundering at the piano, by Charlie Simic pushing back his glasses and eyeing me like a Slavic owl.

The gift was a faith in the life of art, or, more precisely, a sense that there was a life which was not mine, but to which I was welcome to join myself. A life which was larger than any single person’s, and thus not one to be claimed, but to apprentice oneself to. In the larger, permanent community of makers, you could be someone by being no one, by disappearing into what you made. In that life your hands were turned, temporarily, to what beauty wanted, what spirit—not your spirit, not exactly—desired: to come into being, to be seen.

No matter what else, I worked, and worked feverishly: late nights at a succession of instruments which show, like calendar pages falling in an old movie, the progression of time: the Smith-Corona manual, the electric portable, the secondhand self-correcting IBM (so dear and long coveted!), the Brother with the daisywheel that remembered a whole line of type at a time. I wrote endlessly, poems and stories and even a hopeless and hallucinatory novel. Because I was in hiding from myself, because so little of my life had entered the realm of the sayable, my writing was inchoate, veiled. But it was charged with feeling—rage and longing, mostly, though I couldn’t read that then. I practiced my neosurrealism, a perfect disguise for the heart. Reams of paper, boxes and baskets of old manuscripts, half of them squirreled away somewhere still. It wasn’t wasted effort; I was at least playing my scales, investing, in some way, in what might be. And I was honoring my mother, fulfilling one of her wishes for me, not the wish that I’d die but the hope that I’d thrive.

A neighbor boy told me once, delivering the paper, how after midnight he’d hear the clacking hurry of my typewriter drifting from my attic study to his room. He liked it, he said, the late, lonely sound of someone working.