writer friend, Hannah Green; to the hovering presence of Stegner (then on leave), and to unnamed others who embodied that centralityand remain living sustenance to this day.
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I came to circumstanced time.
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We met two afternoons a week in the Jones Room, around an oval, an egg-shaped table (shape of new life in creation) encircled by walls solid with books. A writer's library, carefully gleaned, gathered together as if to concentrate for us, incite us to what makes our medium incomparable. The imperishable, the good, side by side with letters, lives, journals of their creatorsilluminating, intertwining, the ways of their begetting, the joys . . . labor of their creation.
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Encircled, bulwarked so, we practiced writing companionship: read what we had written, listened to each other, talked writing, vivified. Or so it was for me. Enormous had been my morningwith books and notebook in the library, or with the Jones Room books; enormous and yielding would be my late afternoon and evening for I would stay until the last train. When it was possible, I rode from home (San Francisco) with my new friend, Hannah Green, and for the first time had occasion to read aloud, hear in my ears, sounds, rhythms, silences of the written. I read what I had long loved or just come to love: from Verga's Little Tales of Sicily to which Hannah had introduced me; all of Cather's ''Wagner Matinee," Glaspell's "Jury of Her Peers," Chekhov's "Gusev," "Rothschild's Fiddle," "Ward #6"among other treasures. And I was in a frenzy, a passion, of starved intense reading, copying; observing, noting, putting together; reremembering; writingin this vast strange freedom of wholly my-own time.
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In those circumstanced months, in that writing air, in the comradeship of books and writing human beings; in that freed time (for all that there was still full family life, responsibilities)in contrast to the years it took for the writing of "I Stand Here Ironing", the first "Hey Sailor, What Ship?"I came to facility. I made "Hey Sailor" publishable. I wrote all of "O Yes." I began, finished, the first third of "Tell Me a Riddle." Although I did not know it then, I was also gathering, even writing, what would later become substance and actual page after page of Silences ("this book was not written, it was har-
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