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but I leave it for hours at a time, to a place where magic exists alongside rivers and valleys and meandering bazaars. My job is to tell readers about it in such a way that it becomes as real for them as it is for me. Not quite as straightforward as a business letter — and so it shouldn’t be surprising that creative writing requires a different skill set. In fact, what I believe it requires is faith in a paradoxical process that is at once mystical and earthy. Consider, for example, the slippery concept of inspiration. Either we can regard it as the decisively earthy habit of showing up to the page every day, or the struck-by-lightning phenomenon that writers wish would happen more often. How can it be both? I can’t pretend to understand how the mystical part of the writing process works. All I can say is that in my experience it is both. I wouldn’t want anyone to misunderstand me. I am not an advocate of the wait-forinspiration approach to writing; in this way I am as practical as a writer gets. There is craft to learn, and technique to practice. There are the nuts and bolts of grammar, and stanzas, and line endings. I’m a firm believer in discipline. To a certain extent, I think inspiration is earned. It’s the compensation a writer receives for persistent and sustained work even on days when nothing works, or you’re exhausted, or the house needs cleaning, or your life is falling apart. Showing up every day is my way of courting the Muse — that source of inspiration I am convinced exists, call it what you will. I show up. That’s the earthy part. But sometimes I also light a candle. Sometimes I murmur a prayer. When I’m stuck in my work I take the dog for a long walk. I take these walks on faith, knowing that if I open myself to the world and keep my mind still, an answer will come. It always does. Because sometimes inspiration is unearned, more like a form of grace than anything. That’s the mystical part. Writing is punctuation and dangling modifiers and theme and structure, but it’s also ethereal and unnameable. (We writers are a superstitious lot. Name it, and it might just fly away.) Ideas arrive in the shower. Poems drop into my lap literally out of nowhere. Sometimes I go to sleep perplexed by a plot glitch and wake up with the answer. My best work comes when I stumble out of bed to sit at my desk (always with coffee, that’s a nobrainer), my critical right-brain still half asleep and completely unaware that its rainbowcolored partner is already up and dancing with the lampshade on its head. I think writing itself echoes this paradox. In order to fully inhabit your imagination as a writer, you must be able to dream, to make strange links and metaphorical leaps, to think sideways and upside-down. But you must also keep both feet firmly on the ground, eyes open and paying attention to the world around you, senses alert. In my opinion, the best poems and stories rely on strong sensory detail to bring them to life. If there’s food in a poem, readers want to smell it and taste it. If there is clothing, we should sense what it feels like on our skin. Weather is not just a description: rain has a