Janine considered. “Yes and no. It’s been six months since we got in. We’ve been here two days now. That seems pretty short.”

“Good!” Marianne said. “I mean, right? I wouldn’t want this to be the longest workshop of your life.”

“It’s the only workshop of my life. So far.”

“That’s right,” said Marianne, suddenly remembering their phone conversation in the fall, the woman’s shock, her heavy breathing. Then further back, to the poems themselves: modest but tightly packed, wounded. “I loved your poems, actually. About Terri Schiavo. You said you’d only shared them so far with your husband.”

“Thank you for remembering them,” Janine said. Marianne looked over and saw that she was smiling, but she did not ask, as Marianne would have, which ones she had liked best, did not search Marianne’s face for clues about her sincerity.

“Is that what you’re still working on?”

“I don’t know,” Janine said. “I thought I was done with them, but then I had an experience today that made me think I’m not. I think God brought me here for a reason.”

Marianne made her face as plain as it would go.

“I mean, to have certain experiences. To push me. In workshop today, we read this poem, ‘Poetry as Insurgent Art.’ Do you know it?”

“I am signaling you through the flames,” Marianne said, dramatically.

Janine got up and dragged her chair closer. The sky was a deep lavender now. “Right, that’s it. I had this feeling that Lorraine—Ms. Kominski—chose the poem just for me. I know that’s crazy, but that’s how it felt. My husband would say it was Jesus walking next to me, then picking me up and carrying me before I even knew it. Because I felt so weighed down, just before we read it. I kept getting texts from my girls, and I was missing them and missing Rick and thinking, what am I doing here? Do you know I never got an A in an English class in my life? Always Bs, B pluses. And I look around and see all these other people and think, what am I doing here? They must have a reason, they must have talent, but I do not.”

Marianne had in fact always gotten As, and had even been awarded a prestigious scholarship in her first year of graduate school. But where had it gotten her, all that promise? Not much further than Janine, a self-taught poet from Panama City. “Self-doubt,” she said. “I know it well.”

“But then,” said Janine, putting her hand on the armrest of Marianne’s chair. “Lorraine came in, and she passed out the poem and I read it and it just spoke to me. I’ve read that poem so many times today I could recite it for you,” Janine said, and then she recited it.

“That was very good,” Marianne said, when she was finished.