Teaching memoir is teaching vulnerability is teaching voice is teaching self.

Anna would say that she was a cat like Gemma, with nine lives to spend, all nine precious and delicious.

How do you know when an apology is true – when it means something, or can change something, or will last outside the moment?

When I was a boy, that was all I wanted – to grow a pair of wings and get up into the sky. I had a basement full of failed wing projects. Boards and capes and motors, even a pile of found feathers I once tried to glue together with a bottle of Elmer’s; you should have seen your grandmother’s face. But I never got any higher than the backyard fence I’d launch from. I never got inside a cloud. Your raven did.

Empathy smartens you.

Maybe all that matters is that they love each other, still, the way people who have known each other will always love each other.

Love is what you give and love is what you want and love is how you wait, but it doesn’t save you.

Step out from behind the words. When you’re a writer you can imagine that the words speak for you and are you, but they’re not. You are this living breathing bad hair day kind of person.

Imagine music gushing down the hollow places in your bones, and making you liquid, and giving you speed. Imagine music turning your body into a song.

I believe friends enclose us, like a pair of parentheses. Each one knows us differently, each sustains us in a different way.