For me, the writing life doesn’t just happen when I sit at the writing desk. [It is] a life lived with a centering principle, and mine is this: that I will pay close attention to this world I find myself in…. “My heart keeps open house,” was the way the poet Theodore Roethke put it in a poem. And rending in language what one sees through the opened windows and doors of that house is a way of bearing witness to the mystery of what it is to be alive in this world.