If I need something to cheer me up on this gloomy Friday, I’ll just look at this – one of my memoir classes (with a few missing.) The picture was taken for a student who has to leave, to deal with cholera in Haiti. As I said to them that night, “Isn’t it a marvel that on the first day of class, you sit with a bunch of strangers, and by halfway through, you know each other so well and trust each other so much?”

I was thinking again about fiction and non; how during my decade as a professional actress, it became clear that I didn’t want to spend my life pretending to be someone else, some invented character; I wanted to discover my own mind and heart, to explore what I had come to understand. Limited as that focus may be, I still feel that way. And my job is to encourage groups of interesting people, like this, to make the same journey of discovery – not so much into the imagination, though that’s part of it, as directly into the soul.