your hand on someone else's heartbeat

When my husband was in the late stages of his terminal illness, he asked me to read him poetry. He didn't ask for short stories, or essays, or news articles, or the first crisp pages of a novel, with its unfolding narrative weight. The request was unexpected. Despite his five (almost five and a half) decades on this earth, he'd never been much of a reader, though he was incredibly knowledgeable about the world, often serving as my first editor, catching errors or incongruities in my poetry or prose, the wrong slip of a word. And so, without much thought as to why poetry, most evening I obliged him: ferrying a few collections from my study to the living room where he lay on a rented hospital bed, largely paralyzed from both his brain tumour and the muscle-weakening trudge of a year and a half of medications aimed at keeping him alive. From an old loveseat, under faerie lights, our three dogs sleeping around us, I'd read a poem or two from each book, never welling too long on one poet in case the poems I'd selected didn't speak to him in the way he hoped, in that moment, to be spoken to. I suppose, in a strange way, I was curating an anthology for him. 

What strikes me now, about the poems I chose to read to him in late 2018, is how steeped they were in tenderness and knowing. There was one poet's knowing of his own impending death, there was another poet's Buddhist knowing of love - what it means to try at that beautiful and hopeful thing, whether that light is directed at the self, or another, or the world. I've thought a lot about "why poetry" this past year. Why it is, to my mind, the most powerful and instantaneous of the arts. The feeling I get from encountering a good poem is like turning around on a busy street only to discover I've nearly collided with a stranger: the two of us suddenly very close in an unexpected and vivifying way. I admire the visual arts - galleries are one of my life's great pleasures - but in apprehending an artwork there still seems to be a kind of mediating distance that is greater than the intimacy felt when reading a poem. Poetry's cousin, music, is immediate in its own way, but often the maker of the music seems distant - on the other side of the swelling strings and swirling oboes and the musicians playing the composer's notes. In poetry you  have your hand on someone else's heartbeat.

- Aislinn Hunter, from her introduction to Best Canadian Poetry 2025. 

a reckoning by fire

As David St. John—a longtime friend of Levis and one of the figures instrumental in bringing his posthumous work to light—points out in his afterward to Levis’s The Darkening Trapeze (2016), Levis often closes his poems with a reckoning by fire, whether that be a purifying, revelatory fire, such as in “Elegy with an Angel at Its Gates,” or an inferno of damnation, as in “Poem Ending with a Hotel on Fire.” Even the tender poem about his son that concludes The Darkening Trapeze, “God Is Always Seventeen” (which throws us back to “The Poet at Seventeen,” the opening poem of the 1985 collection Winter Stars), ends with this disclosed, stricken sense of loss and an ache for penance:

there was

Some music playing & something inconsolable

And no longer even bitter in the melody & I will never forget
Being there with [my son] & hearing it & wondering what was going to become of us.

This ability to elevate personal vulnerability into lyric is one of the many ways I see Levis’s influence echo through the poems written by my generation. Since his death, poetry has moved ever more visibly toward the personal, especially in poems rooted in identity. While the convention of the “speaker” still exists as a kind of protective veil, many contemporary readers assume, or even crave, a closeness between poet and poem. If this has become a hallmark of twenty-first-century poetics, then Levis can be read as a blueprint of how to draw from one’s inner life—even the ugly parts—with emotional precision that doesn’t tip into self-indulgence.

 - Jacques J. Rancourt, from his essay "Destroying Time: On the Lasting Legacy of Larry Levis" from the January/February 2026 issue of Poetry. You can read the whole thing here.

a kind of deep empathy machine

Karan Kapoor: Your poems live inside questions — and often leave them unanswered. “Where do we go from here?” you ask, before pivoting into a description of clouds, oil changes, and personal injury law ads. I love that refusal to resolve. Do you think poetry should resist the impulse to provide answers? Is uncertainty an aesthetic position for you?

Chris Banks: I like uncertainty in poems and I think there are things one needs to communicate through language and metaphor that cannot be said otherwise in prose. Basically, I want to smash all the frosted windows inside words so the great mysteries of this life shine through. But as for providing answers to why we are here? I’m not sure I can do that except to say I am here, and you are here with me, and this is what I see and feel, and hopefully you see and feel some of that too. Poetry is a kind of deep empathy machine. Almost like one of the massage chairs. Sit with a poem long enough, and you always feel better.  

- Chris Banks, in conversation with Karan Kapoor over at Only Poems. You can read the whole thing here.

the poem as a river

The long poem has a somewhat singular history in Canadian literature. It proliferated among my generation of poets in the 70s and 80s, and Michael Ondaatje's and Sharon Thesen's anthologies of the Canadian long poem attest to its abundance. VIU's own student poet Délani Valin's Malahat Review prize-winning long poem "No Buffaloes" is evidence of its continuing popularity. 

There are several formal aspects of the long poem that have informed much of my own work. A major facet of its aesthetic is its resistance to closure, its desire not to end - the poem as a river. It also resists closure in the syntactic unity of the sentence, thus affording a variety of constructions we can also locate in another hybrid form, the prose poem. These elements have been a major attraction for me, particularly informed by the improvisational possibilities of making poetry like making jazz. 

- Fred Wah, from his 2017 VIU Ralph Gustafson Distinguished Poets Lecture. As published in On My Way to Get a Pail of Water (Arbutus Editions/Gaspereau Press). 

the value of suggestion

The great masters both of the East and the West never forgot the value of suggestion as a means for taking the spectator into their confidence. Who can contemplate a masterpiece without being awed by the immense vista of thought presented to our consideration? How familiar and sympathetic are they all; how cold in contrast the modern commonplaces! In the former we feel the warm outpouring of a man's heart; in the latter only a formal salute. Engrossed in his technique, the modern rarely rises above himself... His works may be nearer science, but are further from humanity. We have an old saying in Japan that a woman cannot love a man who is truly vain, for there is no crevice in his heart for love to enter and fill up. In art vanity is equally fatal to sympathetic feeling, whether on the part of the artist or the public.

Nothing is more hallowing than the union of kindred spirits in art. At the moment of meeting, the art lover transcends himself. At once he is and is not. He catches a glimpse of Infinity, but words cannot voice his delight, for the eye has no tongue. Freed from the fetters of matter, his spirit moves in the rhythm of things. It is thus that art becomes akin to religion and ennobles mankind.

 

- Kakuzo Okakura, from The Book of Tea.

planned obsolescence in all its forms

 

Art can be defined as whatever an artist says it is - and anybody can declare themselves to be an artist. This... people find disconcerting, and annoying. 

Meantime, certain individuals, anxious to have their unusual artistic practice recognized as falling under the definition of their art form, often announce exaggerated claims for what they produce. Such claims frequently include an insistence that their artistic productions are the newest development in the art, and should receive attention precisely for that reason. Our society at the moment is under the sway of values that glorify planned obsolescence in all its forms: fashions, fads, tends, and disposable products that even twenty years ago were considered repairable. Thus, making a fetish of the new is central to commerce as well as being the rationale for some artistic approaches. A barrage of advertising and other propaganda is directed at consumers by enterprises desiring to encourage the purchase of the latest products, In order for this inducement to buy to be successful, people must believe that we have entered an entirely different era in which previously held attitudes and values do not apply. Hence the urgency and frequency with which the corporate cheerleaders - and some of their artistic followers - declare out times to be postindustrial, postfeminist, postmodern. 

...

The term "experimental" for certain kinds of poetry doesn't seem to work either, although that term, too, is in use. "Experimental" is language borrowed from science... In truth nothing is "experimental" about experimental poetry - that is, nothing is definitively proposed, then proved or disproved via reproducible results, as in a scientific experiment. Art, thank God, is neither military nor scientific. It draws from other sources of the human experience. Every sort of writer, in fact, in the act of compositions considers alternative formulations of all the facts of writing - experiments, if you will - and then adopts those nouns, verbs, modifiers, grammatical and formal structures that the author finds will best convey the effects he or she wants to achieve. 

- Tom Wayman, from his Ralph Gustafson Lecture Songs Without Price, as published in a book of the same name (Institute for Coastal Research, 2007).

as we all remember

I decided I wanted to write poems on July 16th, 1999. I was sitting in my parents’ living room in Chester, Nova Scotia. It was four fifteen in the afternoon (this is Atlantic time); I was helping friends to put on a play that week but had the day free until my call time. My mother was listening to a news article about the decision to rebury the Romanovs. Our dog was sick, but would eventually get better.

I was reading my mother’s copy of Leonard Cohen’s Selected Poems – the M&S one from 1968 with the three heads on the cover – specifically the longish poem “Disguises,” which as we all remember started on page 168 of that book, specifically the two lines near the middle that read “Goodbye, articulate monsters./Abbott & Costello have met Frankenstein.” and these two lines gave me that peculiar mix of reactions I keep coming back to poems to find. To be baffled and laid bare how something that stupendous could be that easy to say.

The poem was profound but self-apparent, it was clearly a constructed object but it felt so casual and so easy. It, and another couple hundred poems since then that I consider my personal canon, was a magic box. A fifteen-year-old theatre nerd is surely a mark for a poem as angry and self-possessed and musical as “Disguises.” “Goodbye, articulate monsters” is a teenager’s phrase. It’s not my favourite poem anymore but I do owe it a great deal.

It rained that day in Nova Scotia. I don’t know if it rained or not in Toronto, where I live now.

- Jacob McArthur Mooney, with a very specific answer to a generic question, in interview with All Lit Up. You can read the whole thing here. 

to see the symbiosis

The work, in the small press, is more than the poem you are trying to write. To be engaged in the small press is to be intimately involved in a network of activities, and it is to direct those activities to a communal project. Small press writers are also small press editors, and publishers, and readers, and booksellers, and reading series coordinators, and audience members, and researchers, and, and, and. To be engaged in the small press is to see the symbiosis of these activities, and not to draw any hard lines between them. Each is part of the work of small press writing because there is no small press without this messy piles of activities (however it is that you ultimately define the small press for yourself). Some years you may be all of them, and others maybe just one or two, but within our individual resources we each endeavour to keep some small corner of the whole thing going.

...

Your thing, the thing you put your best literary self and resources into, is going to be forgotten. The question of posterity is how long that process will take, not whether it will occur. But that's ok. You helped the whole big, unwieldy, dispersed thing along, and because of that work - acknowledged or not - the next kids will show up to find something vibrant and alive and worth investing themselves in. They'll call out all the blind spots from the previous iterations (yours among them) and they'll make their own mistakes, but they'll keep it alive too.

-  Cameron Anstee, from his essay/chapbook, Some Silences: Notes on Small Press (Apt. 9 Press, 2024)

a more total silence

Sitting in Michael [Dennis]'s library [of some nine or ten thousand books of poetry] after he died, I though how different it feels as a reader compared to how it feels as a writer. That was something I wasn't prepared for after my first book came out. I am sitting here in my own library with a stack of books by ______ next to me, and so I have this sense as a reader of an ongoing conversation with their work, but it is one-sided in so far as they don't know that I have these books next to me, they don't know that we are in a conversation even though they're doing all the talking and I'm doing all the listening. Or maybe it is ______, who died decades ago and didn't know (because of course they couldn't have known) that their work would be interesting to some obscure minimalist poet in the twenty-first century. For the reader, the book is present, it is a presence, it is being read and reread, but for most writers there is only silence once it goes out into the world and the hope that perhaps you are in a conversation - or a friendship, really - the depths and duration of which you can never really be aware.

I mean that beyond the feelings most writers have that they don't get reviewed often enough, or their work isn't understood, or their sales are inadequate. I mean a more total silence, a kind of mathematical silence, the silence of one book against the million and millions and millions of books that exist (or existed (or will exist)). Think of the difficulty of keeping a book in print for one decade or two, let along across a century. And I also mean the kind of immediate silence of not knowing whether the book is being read here and now. Someone might have your book open in their hands at this exact moment, they could be sitting somewhere in conversation with you, and you will most likely never know. Even if that reader is the generous type who sends notes to writers saying Hey, I liked your book, that lovely and kind gesture still doesn't communicate the ongoingness of the relationship each of us has as readers to books and writers to whom we frequently come back.

-  Cameron Anstee, from his essay/chapbook, Some Silences: Notes on Small Press (Apt. 9 Press, 2024)

neither trap nor puzzle

In her essay “What Does Poetry Do?” from her collection Experiments in Distant Influence, Nova Scotia author Anne Simpson writes about what’s possible when we give ourselves up to the mechanisms of poetry. She uses the experience of reading one’s way through the brutal wars of the Iliad to illustrate poetry’s effects: “It is not just that after reading Homer’s Iliad we feel as though we’ve been hauled through the burning lands, the ash lands. We haven’t just witnessed war; we’ve participated in it. It’s not simply a case that poetry, that all literature, allows us to be attentive to otherness, to imagine otherness, it is that we enter a world of otherness.”

In that otherness, we see ourselves. That, writes Simpson, is the alternative offered by poetry: “the ability to see oneself,” which is “the beginning of knowing and mastering oneself—the beginning of wisdom.” This leads to the chance, by no means guaranteed, that we might “awaken from the dream of ourselves.” 

Poetry is neither a trap nor a puzzle, and not every poem is all-consuming and urgent. But there’s no mistaking that, when you dare to step into the world of a poem—a successfully executed poem, I mean—from the first line, you are hit full-force by the poem’s sensory cues. You have entered an environment of the poet’s own making, and in that place, you become fully awake. Or differently awake. Awake to the unfamiliar airiness or stuffiness of the poem’s “rooms,” and the light therein. When I enter the strange and only partly knowable place of a poem, I grow tense and alert... I watch myself take the poem in. I let it do its work on me. Who am I, in this space? Is this, finally, the real me, coming to the fore?

Within any given poem lies no clear mystery a reader can solve. They’re engaged, after all, with a poem, not a riddle. (Poem riddles do exist, but they’re a rarity these days.) For those who give themselves over to the poem’s rhythms and sounds, its sights and textures and smells—and to the feelings those cues evoke—there are sure to be moments of recognition that land like soft explosions within, the aftermath of which is often an aura of relief, a potent sense of not being alone in this world... But no triumphant “oh, I get it!” awaits at the end, no code that will, at last, open, with a satisfying click, the heavy padlock on the magic shop’s door latch—nothing that will render the poem, and the effect it had, explainable in simple terms. That’s because poems aren’t for solving; they’re for getting lost inside.

- Anita Lahey, from her introduction to Best Canadian Poetry 2024. 

on the way to knowing

Kate Dwyer: I worry that—in America at least—the act of critical thinking is being devalued from a cultural perspective. Do you notice that as a thinker or teacher?

Anne Carson: That’s part of the thing that made me start thinking about hesitation. The last few years I was teaching, I was teaching ancient Greek part of the time and writing part of the time. And the ancient Greek method when I was in school was to look at the ancient Greek text and locate the words that are unknown and look them up in a lexicon. And then find out what it means and write it down. Looking up things in a lexicon is a process that takes time. And it has an interval in it of something like reverie, something like suspended thought because it’s not no thought because you have a question about a word and you attain that as you go through the pages looking for the right definition, but you’re not arrived yet at the thought. It’s a different kind of time, and a different kind of mentality than you have anywhere else in the day. It’s very valuable, because things happen in your thinking and in your feeling about the words in that interval. I call that a hesitation.

Nowadays people have the whole text on their computer, they come to a word they don’t know, they hit a button and instantly the word is supplied to them by whatever lexicon has been loaded into the computer. Usually the computer chooses the meaning of the word relevant to the passage and gives that, so you don’t even get the history of the word and a chance to float around among its possible other senses.

That interval being lost makes a whole difference to how you regard languages. It rests your brain on the way to thinking because you’re not quite thinking yet. It’s an absent presence in a way, but it’s not the cloud of unknowing that mystics talk about when they say that God is nothing and you have to say nothing about God because saying something about God makes God particular and limited. It’s not that—it’s on the way to knowing, so it’s suspended in a sort of trust. I regret the loss of that.

- Anne Carson, in interview with Kate Dwyer over at The Paris Review. You can read the whole interview here. 

to balance an algebra not meant to be solved

When we absorb images, dance or music from a culture outside our own, we may project substantial misinterpretations, but it is also possible to receive the sense of what was intended: a face, a fright, an ode. A written poem in a foreign language is inscrutable. Someone has to ferry it across the difference... To translate a poem faithfully is to balance an algebra not made to be solved; a task for which it does not hurt to invoke the primordial spirits.

- Sadiqa de Meijer, from the essay "stilte/silence" in her essay collection alfabet/alphabet. 

poems do more than soothe or teach

We take poetry too seriously. This occurred to me as I reviewed the magazines my publisher, Biblioasis, sent to me in hefty boxes. When I first took up the form in the mid to late aughts, surrealism and irony were in. The hot new poets rarely said what they meant or meant what they said. They mixed Latinate and vernacular diction and wore the skinniest jeans I’d ever seen. For all their ingenious descriptions of the globalized, technological moment, these poets’ perspective seemed removed from the world, not transcendent but aloof. At worst, their poems were trifling, with little feeling or gravity. Where was the beating heart?

Then history took a turn: asylum seekers’ bodies strewn along European shores, Trump’s chintzy demagoguery, pandemic lockdowns and mass graves, neo-Nazi marches, police violence, historic wildfires, the air thick with ash. As daily life grew more surreal, the dominant voice in poetry became more direct and serious, more rooted in real individual experience. A new generation of literary gatekeepers emerged to facilitate this shift. A number of the magazines I read for this anthology opened with an editor’s note that solemnly reflected on the need to heal, both from the terrors of the recent past and from the legacy of genocide and slavery upon which the so‑called New World was built.

When this trend first emerged, I was excited to see so many poets write candidly and with real political rage about our denial of the past and the untenability of the status quo, often with the same technical adventurousness that drew me to poetry in the first place. At some point over the last decade, however, the content superseded the form. Canadian poets and magazine editors have confused good poetry with good politics. Many poems in journals today consist primarily of solipsistic observations, social justice tropes, and moralizing narratives delivered in a uniform first-person voice. They are wooden and boring. What’s worse, poets cheapen political subject matter when they treat it with formal laziness or as a platform to signal their virtue.

I don’t believe poetry has gotten worse. Great poems continue to be written and published, as I hope the anthology demonstrates. However, the editorial curation now skews heavily in favour of poetry with a social justice message, regardless of how (or how well) it’s written. This orthodoxy is stifling. I read hundreds of magazines in the course of a year, and sometimes it seemed like every other poem was about trauma or the politics of personal identity. Some of these were excellent, but many were indistinguishable fluff.

Poetry may be therapeutic, but it is not therapy. Poetry may be enlightening, but it is not pedagogy. The best poems do more than soothe or teach. They enter and alter our consciousness such that our perception of everything else is filtered through them.

- Bardia Sinaee, from his essay on editing Best Canadian Poetry 2024, "Line by Line." You can read the whole thing here.

we took the desert's role for granted

 

Those downtown institutions - the Sam the Record Man and HMV - are gone now, of course. Vintage Video was uprooted by developers. It doesn't seem to have taken in its new location, which Google Earth reveals is now a Wine Rack. 

Perhaps Netflix and other streaming services are sending young twenty-first-century minds rafting down tributaries of their own... But speed of scrolling, algorithmic assistance, and instant access weren't what my friends and I needed, even if we might've welcomed them as conveniences. We needed that long subway trip downtown. (We were the farthest stop west.) We needed the sobering disappointments and sporadic victories. We needed the longueurs that new technology seeks to close, as if abolishing boredom ever does anyone a favour. Mostly, we needed wind resistance. It took effort to cultivate our enthusiasms in a desert, but it's clear now that we took the desert's role for granted. Knowledge tends to stick when you've toiled for it. 

- Jason Guriel on acquiring physical media in the pre-internet age, from his book On Browsing.

in the absence of style a poem is hamstrung

... precision and technique are paramount. Without them a genuine style cannot be achieved, and no matter how clever the conceit, how deeply felt the emotion, in the absence of style a poem is hamstrung, its race brought to a premature halt. I can imagine several ways to measure the success of a poem or collection. As a common reader, I ask whether I want to read a poem or book again, while as a critic I ask whether I am compelled to write about the works in question. Poets, I suspect, ask whether there is anything to be learned, imitated, or, as T.S. Eliot had it, stolen. But the true test of style is more visceral. Does the poem prompt its reader, arrested yet suddenly moved, to abandon the book and take a breathless lap around the room?

- Nicholas Bradley, reviewing his selection criteria in picking the books in his omnibus review selected from Canadian poetry titles published in 2021, in the "Letters in Canada 2021" issue of University of Toronto Quarterly.

everyone who has ever used those words is there in the language

When I teach, I often tell my students, "The writing knows more than we do." What I mean is that language is a vast repository, a great archive, a word hoard, a storehouse of accumulated knowledge and experience. Everyone who has ever used those words is there in the language. Or is pointedly, not there. Language can be a Stolperstein, a stumble stone. A marker which remembers, which reminds, which draws your attention to time, place, history, culture, to the world. Just by virtue of being a speaker of the language, you have access to this knowledge. You have access to something much larger, much deeper than just yourself. You're a tree connected to the rest of the forest by its roots. Or maybe you're a leaf on a tree, connected to a trunk, connected to a system of roots, which connect you to the entire forest. And as the song goes, the green grass grows all around and around, the green grass all around. But you can see the forest because you're a tree. You're an antennae upside down in the ground.

- Gary Barwin, from his essay "Writing as Rhizome: Connecting Poetry and Fiction with Everything" in the Summer 2023 issue of The New Quarterly.

life is too short not to sing straight from the solar plexus

Soon after I started writing poems and stories it was drilled into me: no sentimentality, no clichés. They were the hallmarks of kitsch. Fair enough. But after years of fanatically heeding that good advice, I felt weary of always detouring around certain registers of emotion and around straightforward, demotic expressions of same. Over the years, I'd often glanced longingly in the direction of song and reflected that many of my favourites - great songs, great poetry, like Kris Kristofferson's "Sunday Morning Coming Down" (1970) and John Prine's "Hello in There" (1971) - are sentimental by the standards of literary modernism. And how many times have we all happily sung along with an excellent song that revives and rehabilitates a cliché? "I'm Your Man," "Dancing in the Dark," "Coming in From the Cold," etc. Musical accompaniment can do that: elevate the sentimental (if not the maudlin) into authentic, redemptive emotion. Defibrillate the commonplace.

As I sank deeper into my 50s, I felt a longing to transcend Upper Canadian reticence and costive over-control, to quit writing in a kind of stoical code. I wanted to get up on stage, figuratively speaking, and belt out a torch song. Why not? Life is too short not to sing straight from the solar plexus, at least some of the time. True, I'd always been trying to do that in poetry, and maybe the lack of musical accompaniment put a useful pressure on the poems to make their own music, but somehow that was no longer enough. As Prine sang, "your heart gets bored with your mind, and it changes you."

 

- Steven Heighton, discussing his return to writing and recording music, with Alyda Faber in the Fall 2022 issue of The Dalhousie Review. 

that personal theatre of dreams and grievances

Alyda Faber: Your free verse poetry is as crafted and concise as your poems following a defined form. Does this relate to what you say in Workbook about the artifice of writing?

Steven Heighton: Artifice is essential - which is to say, form is essential. Free verse poetry either has form - an internal skeleton as opposed to the exoskeleton that you find in a sonnet, say, or a villanelle - or it's just chatter, jotting, typing. The appeal of passing off untransformed personal minutiae as art is obvious: it's easy and, if it gets read and praised, there's a really direct form of ego validation (they don't just like my writing, they like ME). Personally, even if producing such work is easier, I don't want to spend any more time than I already do in the airless little cell of my ego. For me, writing is an escape from ego. I understand that when you're seated in that personal theatre of dreams and grievances, you can almost believe it's the realest thing in the world and everything beyond it is less real - a figment, a projection - but the opposite is true. The world is real, and the ego is a construction - a little shadow theatre, like Plato's cave.

 

- Steven Heighton, in conversation with Alyda Faber in the Fall 2022 issue of The Dalhousie Review. 

this annoyed the man

'What's your job?'

'I'm a poet,' admitted Ivan with slight unwillingness.

This annoyed the man.

'Just my bad luck!' he exclaimed, but immediately regretted it, apologised and asked : 'What's your name?'

'Bezdomny.'

'Oh . . .' said the man frowning.

'What, don't you like my poetry?' asked Ivan with curiosity.

'No, I don't.'

'Have you read any of it?'

'I've never read any of your poetry!' said the visitor tetchily.

'Then how can you say that?'

'Why shouldn't I?' retorted the visitor. 'I've read plenty of other poetry. I don't suppose by some miracle that yours is any better, but I'm ready to take it on trust. Is your poetry good?'

'Stupendous!' said Ivan boldly.

'Don't write any more! ' said the visitor imploringly.

- Mikhail Bugalkov, The Master and Margarita (trans. Michael Glenny).

glimpses of how my books are carried

During the solitary months and years spent writing a book, it can be easy to forget that it will—if you are lucky—live a social life. That your book might enter the imaginations and memories of its readers and thrive there, that your book might be crammed into pockets or backpacks and carried up mountains or to foreign countries, or that your book might be given by one person to another. Perhaps the aspects of authorship I cherish most are the glimpses I get of how my books are themselves carried, or are themselves given. When I sign books at readings, people frequently want their copies inscribed as gifts. Would you make this out to my mother, who loves mountains?... to my brother, who lives in Calcutta?... to my best friend, who is ill?... to my father, who is no longer able to walk as far as he would wish...? Several times I’ve been asked to inscribe books to young children who can’t yet read: We want to give this book to them now, so it’s waiting for them when they’re ready for it. These conversations with readers, and the stories that arise from this giving of gifts, are among the strongest of the forces that keep me writing.

- Robert MacFarlane, from his essay The Gifts of Reading. You can read the whole thing here.