Evidence
Port Townsend
1993
Before reading from her book of poems, Flash Paper, Theresa lit a piece of flash paper on fire. It sparked, burst into flame, and disappeared. In Baltimore flash paper was illegal. Bookies there used the treated paper to record their bets and burn the evidence, if need be, leaving nothing, not even ashes, she said. Her father had been a bookie in Baltimore. She read in the theater on the old army base where the Centrum Writing Conference was held. William Stafford was in the audience. He would die later that year. He famously wrote every day. In his workshops, he always said one should neither praise or blame, and when writers came to him saying they were blocked he said they should lower their standards. More curious than critical always, and, that night at his reading, he began by reminding us how long he’d lived but how there was always something new. And then he mentioned Theresa’s flash paper demonstration and her reading. Theresa, back in the barrack with Sam, missed his reading. I told her about the reading and how she had impressed William Stafford at hers.