Suddenly I find myself only a few steps away from finishing the first draft of The Conversation. I can't imagine how I managed to write it.

This always happens to me: I look back at a book I've finished, and the process of making it feels like a hallucination.

Yesterday I wrote the afterword, revised the introduction, created a title page and a dedication page. Today I will work on the acknowledgments, and right now I want you to know that my primary thanks will go to my friend Carlene, who has proofread every single chapter: tracking down my typos, shortening my sentences, tightening my explanations, and pointing out my foolishness--all while continuing to teach high school English classes and write her own graduate-level papers. Quick, efficient, kind, exact, and ruthless: what a gift she has been, not least because she has put so many of the book's ideas into practice in her classroom. She is the sort of teacher that students remember forever: brisk and sensible but also demanding, freeing, and intensely curious. She loves her subject, she loves her students, and she is at peace in a classroom. I am immensely grateful to have had such a colleague.

I met Carlene at The Frost Place, where I've also met many of you who visit this blog. My association with those few acres of rocky New Hampshire hillside has changed my life as a poet, a teacher, and a human being. So when I wrote yesterday's dedication, this was what I found myself having to say:

To the teachers and the poets of The Frost Place

This is a fire I caught from the earth.

--Robert Frost

Thank you, all of you, for the fire.