Here I am in the President Street apartment on my birthday, many years ago. With a notebook, a love letter, a polaroid land camera, Emily Dickinson and a glass of water. What else is essential?

It’s the essential I’m looking for when I set out to write anything. My preoccupations are myth, physics, good people trying to do the right thing, the interplay of the overt and the subtle, the challenge of living joyfully in a time of climate change and ways to begin again.

The books I think of as bibles are William Meredith’s The Cheer, Søren Kierkegaard’s Works of Love, Joseph Campbell’s The Power of Myth, Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching, Walker Percy’s The Second Coming, Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and the Essays of E.B. White.

I’ve received degrees from Middlebury College and New York University, have attended the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Tin House Summer Writers Workshop, and was a fellow at the Hambidge Center in Georgia.

My other teachers have been the mountains and rivers of Vermont, the hills of San Francisco, the parks and bars of Brooklyn, disappointment, love, psilocybin and the best dog in the universe, Juniper.

I have, in turn, taught creative writing at NYU and The New School.

These days I live in the Hudson Valley, where I’m at work on two books, or maybe more. You can read The End of the World, a novel appearing in serial, here.