Once in a while, you get a phone call that changes your life. No, I'm not exaggerating. It's 2000, early April, and there's a message on my machine from a person who wants me to call back as soon as I can. When I do, after not sleeping very well, the person tells me that I've just gotten a Wisconsin Institute Fellowship.

At that point, I had been out of the writing life for so long that I had felt like that life was dead to me, so that fellowship meant everything. That fellowship year was the year that I stopped feeling like an absolute failure, poetry-wise, that I started writing again, after not having written a word for almost three years, and that I completed the poems that make up most of the last third of my book. I'm sure, by the way, that my book never would have gotten published without those poems. The more that time passes, the more that that year means to me.

The person on the phone on that April day? Jesse Lee Kercheval. But she wasn't just the bearer of spectacularly good news; she was a wonderful boss and she really took care of us fellows.

I last saw her in February of this year, when she had me fly in to do a reading. See, she's still taking care of us.

Then I got an e-mail today from C.G. Hanzlicek, a geat poet/my thesis advisor/my favorite professor while I was at CSU, Fresno, letting me know that Jesse Lee's reading this Thursday as part of the Fresno Poets' Association Reading Series.

Such great news.