There were a variety of these, or as Oscar liked to say of them, “great rats and small rats, lean rats and brawny rats.” In person they might be odd, eccentric, unimpressive, vain and quarrelsome, but on the page, they blazed. There was Philip Kirby, ancient now, who had once known Ferlinghetti. And Lucca Benin, a sorrowful little bald man who wrote so beautifully about death and immortality. Lolly Robinette, who had lived in a Buddhist monastery for five years under a vow of silence. Pyotr Bogrov, who played his mandolin for us.

On such occasions I was part tour guide, part hostess, showing the visitors around, fetching them drinks. I didn’t mind, even when men went out of their way to make sprightly conversation with me. It wasn’t any worse than putting up with the landscapers. And all the while I got to listen to them, their enthusiasms, their feuds and rivalries. Nobody ever seemed to think I was listening. I was slowly working my way through the poems in the magazine’s winter issue. I decided I liked some of them better than others, which was the way it was supposed to be. I decided I wasn’t particularly edgy.

I’d given the issue of Compass Points with Mathias’s poem to Viridian. She read the poem, studied the page, then handed the magazine back to me. Isn’t that interesting, she had said, and I should thank Doug for letting her see it. Which I did. If Doug had expected her to say more, I couldn’t tell. He’d nodded, put the magazine back in the bookshelf, and climbed into the hammock to make a phone call. No one was going to tell me anything.

I got up to change the sprinklers’ path and when I came back inside, Sacha said to me, “We have an idea. Please hear us out and don’t take it the wrong way.” She turned her curly head to Viridian, waiting.

I looked from one of them to the other. Viridian said, “There’s a writer’s conference the end of August, up near Placerville. A number of us will be there and we were wondering if you’d like to go as well.”

“I’m not a writer.” My first reaction.

“You would be on the staff. Help with setting things up, running the conference. There’s a little bit of money in it and you could go to the readings and some of the class sessions if you wanted.”

“It’s sponsored by an environmental foundation,” Sacha said. “Harnessing the power of the arts to heal the planet.”

“All very worthwhile.”

“Into the Woods. That’s what we always call it.”

“Of course, it has a more serious name.”

“Absolutely. Serious stuff.” Although they were both trying not to laugh, as if at some past joke.