Dear Wigleaf:

I'm writing to you from a very small island in Troy, New York, on the Hudson River. In 1647, local records declare, a white whale ventured down this wide river after a season of extreme spring flooding. It heralded a night of thunder and lightning storms. I'm telling you this because centuries later Herman Melville lived near this very island—called Starbuck Island, after the Starbuck brothers who ran an iron foundry on it—the Hudson in his backyard, writing sketches and novels. Melville eventually wrote a vengeful novel while living in Massachusetts about a white whale, a captain called Ahab, and a first mate named Starbuck.

Moby-Dick, a novel that borrowed from many whale legends, was a flop at first. But another generation decided it captured something essential. Daydreaming about one of my favorite writers, while gazing at today's muddy Hudson, I wonder about creativity and the natural world. How much of it is around us or within us? I wonder if it's enough to watch snow white egrets and seagulls hunting in the shallows. Can writers enjoy them in the moment, or must they always be searching for something to grab, hold on to, process, mold, and produce? Capture?

In isolation, this pandemic forces more questions than answers. A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard, wrote Melville. What school are we graduating from, when covid is behind us? As a writer, what will I be compelled to capture and send out to you?