·
Margaret Atwood said that a word after a word after a word is power. When I heard this quote, it took me back to my childhood love affair with the gifted and plucky fiction writer Esther Freisner.
Not everyone gets to experience the electricity of a sentence that sings to you, but you can always tell when you're talking to someone who has. Their bags and backpacks are weighted down with the modest but companionable heft of a good book. They have dark circles are their eyes are always a little bleary from a lifetime of reading way past their bedtime. They are forever asking, "So what are you reading right now?"