December 14, 2019HoneysuckleLyn Lifshin

“I am told that when I was younger than three, on a trip from Barre to Middlebury, Vermont, on a back road, I said that ‘the trees look like they are dancing.’ My mother, who named me Rosalyn Diane thinking it was a perfect name for someone in theater, something she would have loved—if I didn’t do that, maybe I’d be a writer. Since I skipped from first grade to third and never got long division or any math, I excelled in reading and writing. I had a teacher who had us write every day, brought in say a jar of apple blossoms and read us Blake and Wordsworth. One day I copied some words from Blake, showed it to my mother and said I wrote them. Not surprising, in a tiny New England town, she ran into my teacher and raved about how inspiring she’d been and how her daughter had written a poem using words she never knew I knew. By Monday, I had to write my first own poem. I still have it and the one on apple blossoms.”