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I have been teaching writing for over thirty years. Name a writing class and I have probably taught it. Fiction, nonfiction, AP Literature, many freshman composition classes, a plethora of variations on the theme of writing better, writing to get accepted, writing to heal, writing to critique or record one's life. I don't claim to be a brilliant short story writer or a poet, but I have taught both subjects.

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Sometimes, we go somewhere for a reason that becomes an entirely different reason once the journey is complete. I recently spent six days in Manhattan, which was booked in, honestly, a snit, as I found my patience exhausted by my husband's adjustment to retirement in Northern Michigan. Also I longed for diversity of people, places, and, yes, noise. Here on the Leelanau Peninsula, there is paradise and a gilded cage that somehow makes the beauty, trees, lakes, rolling hills, squirrels, wild turkeys, and deer less appealing. You miss seeing people who don't look like you, speak a different language, or have a different accent; the sounds of a city with its crowds of people, sirens, and car horns bring peace rather than pain.

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I  grew up in a world with standards that were nearly impossibly high. My parents, both Harvard graduates, and my father, a PhD, were brilliant, funny, and wildly critical. As a child, I barely touched books meant for children, almost immediately reading Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Austen, Woolf, Dickens, and Hardy. I was exposed to Fellini and Truffaut, adult conversations that were inappropriate and enthralling, and adults living life at a speed difficult for their children to match. I was a teenage alcoholic, sober by my mid-twenties and sober still. I want to own this history without the judgment that seems to accompany every choice I have ever made as a writer. Writing, like teaching, is everything good in my life, which also means it needs to be protected and allowed to falter without my rushing forward, declaring I am done. Yes, it is very hard and sometimes awful, but it is also the thing that saved my life. Over the years, the question has been posed, "Are you still writing?" I silently think as I affirm that I am, "Yes, I am breathing, I am alive, I am a writer."

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