From Constructing a Nervous System, a memoir, which will be published this month by Pantheon.

I started teaching women writers in the early Nineties. When I thought about my own writing—its materials, its form, what needs would drive it—I wanted to learn from every one of them: from Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, Elizabeth Bishop, Gwendolyn Brooks. I was also working out how to succeed as a teacher in the classroom, unprotected by a page and a byline.

I started teaching full-time in 2006. And I taught The Song of the Lark, Cather’s luminous portrait…