It’s New Year’s Day. For those of us on the calendar inherited from the Romans, it’s a day that looks both backward and forward with the two faces of Janus. It’s a day loaded with expectation, possibility, and contradiction. For what, after all has changed? As always, we have grown a day older, the sun…

Oftentimes in my teaching of creative writing, I include on the syllabus this passage from the poet Muriel Rukeyser’s book The Life of Poetry:  “Faith is found here, not in a destiny raiding and parceling out knowledge and the earth, but in a people who, person by person, believes itself. Do you accept your own…