I am getting married to a writer & have always wondered what it’s going to be like. I write songs and not stories but this makes me so excited about the future.

A dozen years ago I attended a John Updike reading at Colorado College, one packed to the gills with earnest undergrads who assaulted him with the mindless questions you are also asked. I got the feeling the students were being assigned extra credit by their teacher for having hatched a question, any kind of question, no matter how banal.

This is what he did with those questions: he pondered each with profound — extravagant — attention, answering each at length, and, in the process, turning the question into something larger, something wonderful, a kind of new and perfect revelation.