HE IS DEPRESSED. “How are you?” he asks. “Are you writing?” This is often the first question we ask each other. “Yes,” I answer, and even I am surprised at the exultation in my voice—the lust. “That’s good,” says Steve, and his own voice is like the confession of disease. He isn’t writing. He is fifty years old, a good poet, a poet with decades of work behind him. He says he has forgotten how to write, has lost the simplest lessons of construction and sound, and wakes in a rage. When he was gone last summer, he sent me some of his oldest poems to read, and before I could reply, another letter came. “Why haven’t you said anything about my poems?” he wrote. “They’re my heart.” MY SON’S BEST friend’s mother calls me for advice on her memoirs. The bank clerk tells me he’s taking a class in the novel. The carpenter I hired to build a closet says shyly that he is writing a children’s book. My neighbor says, wistfully, “It seems like everyone wants to be a writer but me.”
