There was a physicist who played the violin. One morning he took his fiddle to the lab, wrapped it green with felt, clamped it gently in a vise, and trained the electron microscope close on the spruce belly, just beside the sound hole, where a steel peg was set humming at a high frequency. Through the microscope, once he got it focused right, he saw the molecular surface of the wood begin to pucker and ripple outward like rings on a pond, the ripples rising gradually into waves, and the steel peg a blur at the heart of play.

When...

She is dressed in simple gray before us. Into the meetinghouse without image or emblem, I have come with my friends, a group of touring writers. We call ourselves “The Forgotten Language Tour,” and we have turned aside from our performance circuit through Iowa to visit the Amana Colony. Our hostess has told us her name is Harriet, and she is here to share with visitors the customs of her people in this cluster of Iowa villages that call themselves “The Community of True Inspiration.” I sit toward the back, on the last of the pine benches, which look to...

My writing is plagiarized, but not from books. I hear speeches, conversations, and single sentences I want, and often in one pass they remain in my mind, to be transcribed at relative leisure. How does this come to me?

When I first haunted the Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Nevada, I witnessed hours of recitations among the faithful. These were working ranch hands and families from all over the West who found pleasure in sharing poems they had memorized, often without knowing who had written what they knew by heart. After hearing an appealing piece, a listener might say privately to...

Reading the classified section in Mexico City’s Tiempo Libre, I came across the notice for an unusual public service:

Hospital of the word: emergencies and preventative attention. Permanent workshop for the defense of the Spanish language . . . consultations . . . conferences . . . intensive therapy . . . clarify doubts . . . first time assistance.

This anonymous writer was nudging me toward a way of seeing my work, giving me a name for my practice. Maybe my notebook is the hospital of the word, and I practice my roving services by being what in Spanish...

The conference was a fine one, where the Wyoming Council on the Arts had gathered us in Casper to wrestle the issues and opportunities of the art trade. But after a couple sessions my head got full and I had to get out. I went softly out the ballroom door, down the motel corridor, across the dusty-white parking lot out back, up the embankment to the railroad tracks, and west. I had to get dust on my shoes and sage in my nose. I had to seek something older than my kind. At the trestle, I scuffed down from the...

The other night in class, I heard from each of you why your busy lives have kept you from writing. It broke my heart—especially since I share your predicament and had to confess a dry spell of my own. What shall we do about time and our writing?

Life is a river of stories. Time is a storm of many flavors. What net can catch them? What is the tool, the flask, the spoon for sipping? What is the process to funnel the galaxy of language and story to the writing nib now?

When I watch a great beech...

When I conducted a writing workshop in Port Angeles, Washington, someone asked, “How do you write an essay?” That was our topic, and I was the visiting expert hired to know. But somehow the question stalled me. I couldn’t explain. We went around the table and told something of ourselves (the introductions becoming longer and more interesting stories as we went). Then that question again, “How do you write an essay?” All I could do was to say something about working from a sense of abundance. “Abundant what?” they asked. Well, that’s what we don’t know yet. Once we know,...

Most of a writer’s difficulties are what my father used to call “happy problems.” I remember hearing this phrase often as a cheerful response to my report of anguish. Childhood is so rich with possibilities, we kids often experienced summer afternoon as a crisis: Should we swim, hike to the local forest, make a fort in the yard, shoot bows and arrows, or call a friend? We viewed these choices as conflicting claims; our father viewed them as rich options. Now my father is gone, and I am left with his philosophic challenge: happy problems. As writers we have plenty....

For years I have gone to class unprepared to teach. Please don’t tell my dean. I don’t want to live this way, and I’m sometimes stricken with guilt. But the world is such a busy place, and the phone rings, the inbox fills with mail I feel I must answer, and I’m so optimistic about my ability to do it all that class time rolls around, and I haven’t planned my lecture on how to write.

On second thought, though, maybe this inability is actually my greatest resource. Maybe you should tell my dean—that I have, by force of...

How many teachers have told you, “If you want to be a writer, start by being a reader”? I’ve heard it so often I say it to myself. I’m constantly copying titles of books recommended by friends into the back pages of my pocket notebook. I have a long list of intentions there. Books spill from the shelves at home, and a locked storage unit in town holds what I call my library. But the act of reading, in my writing life now, is a rare indulgence.

My father used to tell about my behavior in childhood when the family...

I have learned from a friend about a legal process called “open discovery.” This requires the prosecutor and the defense attorney to hide nothing. Each clue one discovers is given to the other. When all clues have been shared, their work in court is to compose the strongest story of what happened.

My friend said his own research on behalf of an Alaskan boy accused of murder had led him beyond story to myth, to ancient Tlingit tellings that defend our kinship with the earth, with that world where woman marries bear, and the people trace their ancestry direct to...

Several years ago I received a manila envelope out of the blue from my aunt Helen:

Dear Kim:

I’m sending you this because it seems important to me that one should be known really well by at least one person. And I guess you are it.

What followed was a five-page single-spaced typescript titled “My Life,” which began with my aunt’s first memory, c. 1906, and then an early recurring dream, then a multitude of childhood sensations and confusions, a series of cryptic signposts along the way, and finally a trio of epiphanies.

When I asked Helen about this project,...

When I left college to conduct an oral history project in the 1970s, I learned how the spoken language is performed in the key of “and.” A storyteller ends each “sentence,” each episode in the long recollection, with the word “and,” which simultaneously holds the floor from interruption and links one action to the next. This makes the music of one’s life feel endless.

At the same time I was observing this performance quirk, I was troubled by the way school had taught me to write interminable prosy sentences, with proof piled upon proof in classy rhetorical structures that left...

Where does your writing actually get done—in time, and in space? What have been the conditions that, perhaps unpredictably, produced your most interesting work? Are there places or times you would consider impossible to write? Are there places or times you believe would assure you happy writing?

I remember thrifty undergraduate days, when I wrote most of my poems in a closet and on the backs of envelopes. I stacked my clothes on the bedroom floor and politely departed from my roommate by retiring to the closet, where I had a desk and chair and lamp. I was thinner...

In college I signed up for the class called “Camp Cookery” just because I was curious and had Wednesday nights free. It turned out to be a required course for all geology majors, and we twelve men rolled up our sleeves, put on our aprons, and were instructed by Miss Pelch in the mysteries of mock apple pie and the secrets of the stove.

Imagine a row of eleven pies baked golden brown, and then my cinder.

One night Miss Pelch told us a private trick, which I have never used in cooking, but which has saved my writing often...

The answer must be pleasure. If I don’t write for pleasure, I want to adjust the conditions until I do. The pleasure of immersing myself in stories wakes me in the morning, and makes me reluctant to retire at night. So much of life is attrition, and how precious the realm of creation, seeing stories and poems come into existence, as if from nowhere, a garden in the open land. As my daughter said when she was young, “I love the way you can impossible make things up on the piano.” Me too, with only a pen and a blank...

A standard question in literary life is “What book most influenced you on your path to becoming a writer?” Many answers are possible, and the wonderful thing is that any book might be the most important at the moment you are reading. But overall, I realize I have an odd answer: The most important book for me was the first one I wrote—or helped write. My parents called it Lost Words, and it was a compendium of the unusual things the four children in my family said when we were small. Both our parents were teachers, especially alert to...

What is the speed of life? I remember two sensations from my youth. One, that I would last forever, a euphoria of eternity with the earth. Second, that I would suddenly end, that my whole long life would collapse into a moment and be done, that I would suddenly wake, ancient and finished.

In school, they taught me the speed of light, how a river of sunlight hurtles toward our green earth. They taught me the speed of sound, how an echo, the wail of a departing train sings at a certain speed.

But what about the speed of knowing,...

I began to lose my innocence about ravishing fame one day when I came to work, sifted the mail on my desk, and opened a letter on New Mexico motel stationery:

Kim:

I was playing a charity gig down in Albuquerque when I came across one of your songs. It’s good. Damn good. I want it. If you have any more that good, I want them too.

—Johnny Cash

With letter in hand, I returned to the outer office and asked the secretary, “Which of my friends faked this? Do you recognize the handwriting?”

Mary took the letter from me,...

A friend calls this life “a bridge from before to after.” On this bridge, crossing as a writer, a teacher, and a seeker, what shall I do—especially now? I have stories to tell, and ways to begin. But what is my particular calling in the world? My father said vocation means “your job is to find what the world is trying to be.” What are we writers trying to be, in these times, and what is our work on behalf of the healing of the world?

When I turned from the tv images the morning of September 11, 2001,...