How did you first engage with poetry?
Books were certainly important in my household - my mother was a high school English teacher, my aunt a professor of children’s literature - but I don’t recall that we read much poetry. Novels, definitely. I always had a sense that reading could transport a person to new worlds and lead to a deeper understanding of the self. During junior high, my friend Nadine Rae and I made up stories about boarding schools, riding academies, murders, witches, fairies, which led me to start writing things down. Another friend, Erin MacDonald, introduced me to poetry - that of the Romantics and of bands like Duran Duran. We wrote in tandem, finished each other’s poems, spurred each other on. After high school, a letter writing relationship with Reinhardt Heinrichs kept me going, generating words to share, trying to match his strangeness. During medical school, I often wrote during class, inspired by the scientific language and what I was learning about the mind and the body and how they are connected.
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