Holly

Her mother’s ironclad dictum, badgered into Holly from the time she was a toddler: What you don’t want to do is what must be done first. Then it’s out of the way. This has stuck with Holly, as many childhood lessons do… for better or worse.

There are a number of poems that share that leitmotif, that questioning of identity and reality. Those are the strongest.”

“You suggested the beats, so that’s who I’m reading. I got an anthology at the college bookstore. Ginsberg, Snyder, Corso, Ed Dorn… I love him… Lawrence Ferlinghetti…

It makes her think of a documentary she saw about Bob Dylan. A folk singer from Greenwich Village in the sixties said, “He was just another guitar player trying to sound like Woody Guthrie. Then all at once he was Bob Dylan.”

Did you know the human liver contains all nine essential amino acids?

But she’ll talk to Imani McGuire. Holly is a fan of Michael Connelly’s detective hero, Harry Bosch, and especially of Bosch’s number one maxim: get off your ass and go knock on doors.

Em pretends to cover her ears. “I pay no attention to what writers say about their work. It’s what the work says about the writer that matters.”

asperity.

“Well, it ain’t his folks paying your bills, I don’t have to be a detective to know that.” Althea puts her hands behind her head and stretches, jutting out a truly mammoth bosom that shades half her desk.