It’s like you don’t know if you’re remembering it, really, or it’s the picture that has [turned] into a memory. That’s fascinating. So, you’re two years old, your brother’s four, and you’re adopted, and you go to California . . .

I felt like my son’s birth destroyed the narrative I’d heard about giving birth and becoming a mother, and I had to recreate a story for myself. So I wanted the form to reflect that muddling . . .

Dear Reader,

We began this project as a commitment to writing through real time and place. For us, time and place are not abstract concepts, but distinctive material conditions that shape the architecture of thought and feeling. Over seven months, the twelve letters below traversed between continents.

Solmaz Sharif once offered me this great analogy in terms of animals, the mole and the fox. I think the idea that you’re writing the same poem over and over illustrates this idea of a mole. The mole tunnels down into the earth, as opposed to the fox who is trying to leap and run all over the countryside. It’s leaping over fences. It’s always moving into other territory.