Tillie Olsen said, "It is a long baptism into the seas of humankind, my daughter. Better immersion than to live untouched." It has taken me years to consent to that baptism. Writers who have helped me along the way have been Yeats, Emily Dickinson, Dylan Thomas, Richard Wilbur, Linda Pastan, Mary Oliver, Billy Collins, Ted Kooser and Naomi Shihab Nye.

When I understood that my penchant for expecting the worst had blinded me to my capacity for joy, I found poets to show the way. Barbara Hamby's "Thus Spake the Mockingbird" was a revelation. Jack Gilbert's "A Brief for the Defense" became a survival manifesto, and Ross Gay taught me that actively seeking delight was a worthy occupation. I read "Charlotte's Web" and "The Wind in the Willows" every year or so. I grew up on the cadences of the King James Bible and around grown-ups who could still recite poems they learned in school. When I first started writing, I had the illusion that if I could just find the right words, people would take me seriously and do what needed to be done. It didn't work, but it gave me the satisfaction of figuring out what I thought.

I lived my first 60 years in Texas where people talked in colorful idioms, moved to Kansas with its own sensibility, and now live in Nashville. As an octogenarian who lives alone, I see how unlovely and lonely life can be. Fortunately, I have a family consenting to their own baptisms, and I live in a community of cohousers and friends I've gathered over the years. I need other people, but I also need that space in the morning when I can be alone with that Presence who blesses me and helps me find the words to express it.