I recently received an e-mail from a graduate student in Melbourne, Australia, who was preparing a class presentation on an essay that I had written on creative nonfiction for the Cambridge Companion . . .

I recently reread one of my published translations. A mistake. This is not something I normally do, and for good reason: just as no piece of writing is ever truly finished, it holds even truer that no translation is ever truly complete. Oh, it may seem so at the time of publication.

I was born in a small city in Guatemala, whose cobblestone streets and colorful colonial architecture have long housed a healthy community of American ex-pats. Growing up there, Spanish and English came to me like twins: chronologically, one was handed to me before the other . . .

A year ago, I wrote in the margins of a poem of mine, “IDEA: Could send out as letterpressed cards . . . recipients can begin to (&, eventually,) assemble the poem whole.” It was winter and Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing was still settling in me from the summer before. I was growing more . . .

I grew up on a small farm in West Townsend, Massachusetts, northeast of the Worcester Hills, at the border of southern New Hampshire. Its house and barns were built in 1800, and thirty years later, as the first stirrings of the Industrial Revolution whispered through, my family erected a cooperage there among the pastures and apple trees, a small clapboard outbuilding . . .

I still have my first book in English, A Picture Dictionary for Children by Garnette Watters and S. A. Courtis, given to me by Mrs. Woodward, a Block Parent volunteer who lived several blocks from our home on Norfolk Street. Though I wasn’t part of the program, Mrs. Woodward had approached . . .