Back in 1986, as my classmates and I prepared to graduate high school, we found ourselves flummoxed by the two words our tweedy English teacher had scrawled in our yearbooks. It looked like the first might be Only… but the second? Was it connect? Or correct? And either way, what was that supposed to mean? Grudgingly, Mr. Quarrie told us the words were Only connect, and with a little more prodding said that he was quoting E.M. Forster and if we wanted to know more than that we should go do the research.

Now here it is some thirty years later, I’m a writer, and it seems all I do is connect. I connect glyphosate to butterflies and butterflies to people; I connect the pink ribbon campaign to corporate profiteering; I connect my own illness to the mysterious illness suffered by Henry James’ sharp-witted sister Alice; I connect the child I was to the woman I am now and memory to the fallibility of memory. I follow the threads of my curiosity and I weave the threads into essays, stories and poems.