Yesterday I received page proofs for my poetry collection How the Crimes Happened . . . so it looks as if it really will be in print soon. I'm excited, not only about holding my own book in my hands but about being a CavanKerry author. The press publishes a number of writers I admire greatly: writers who tend to be quietly committed to their art rather than flashy marquee names but who work at a high technical and what one might call a high moral level: they ask those questions that are difficult to ask. My friend and mentor Baron Wormser is one of these writers; so are Robert Cording and Gray Jacobik, whose most recent manuscripts are sitting on my desk, waiting to be copyedited. It's an abiding pleasure, and a lesson, to be in their company.

So here I sit in a warm house on a sleety February morning, listening to plow trucks and to my children fretting about whether or not they have a two-hour school delay. In the shadowy lamplight, the spines of the books on my shelves glow--slivers of red, green, gold, black. I want to run my fingers over them; I want to read them all with my fingers--but I don't. I just look and them; I just pretend; I just make up these little stories. And then I tell them to you.