Star On Which These Eyes Have Seldom Closed

Without some early encouragement, how many of us would have continued to write, to draw, to cut up books for collage, to sculpt, to experiment with cooking, with hair dye or make-up? Praise may have been scanty, but had there been none at all, who would have persisted?

At 18 I had more or less given up on writing. But moving away from my home town, to Indianapolis, I found that I missed one particular young lady friend. So I wrote Kara a longish letter. In her reply, she told me that she had loved the letter, had laughed out loud, and even had read parts of it to her father. Her praise revived for me the early desire to write poetry.