By Marcia Hurlow

I don't write with the intent to deal with something in my life. Instead, an image or a phrase or a sound calls me to write. Then in the process of writing, I discover an idea or event that I wanted to understand will emerge. Writing freely lets me make discoveries and associations that often surprise me, and sometimes those discoveries are about concerns that I was trying to avoid. An example I mentioned last year at the conference was the poem that won one of the library's contests, “Maps”. When my mother was in the last stages of Alzheimer's, she told me that on the way to France, she and Dad had stopped at Heathrow, just to be able to say she had been in England. The phrase that she had landed just to say she'd been there stuck with me. The little phrase had its own music. Also, she had never travelled outside of North America, which developed into the poem in a spare hour I had in a coffee shop to avoid thinking about being her caretaker.