“I walk around my apartment and read aloud from The Norton Anthology of Poetry. There are a few favorites: Michael Drayton’s “Sonnet 61”: “Since there’s no help, come let us kiss and part; / Nay, I have done, you get no more of me”; John Donne’s “A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy’s Day, Being the Shortest Day”: “Oft a flood / Have we two wept, and so / Drowned the whole world, us two; oft did we grow / To be two chaoses, when we did show / Care to aught else; and often absences / Withdrew our souls, and made us carcasses”; and John Keats’s “This Living Hand”: “See here it is— / I hold it towards you.” I’m a little like a character from a Whit Stillman movie when I do this—remember the scene from Barcelona where the one guy puts on polka music (or something similar) and dances around his apartment while he reads from the Bible?—but I know that a story isn’t too far away when I reach for the Norton.”
—Hannah Pittard, author of The Fates Will Find Their Way (HarperCollins, 2011)