Perhaps the most important gift we can give ourselves as writers is permission. Permission to try, permission to fail, permission to say something forbidden or ugly or embarrassing or painful, permission to soar. Permission to be important, for the writing and our time to matter, for the dream to take a certain precedence, amid the storm of ordinary woes and chores, obligations and daily fears. Permission to love the words, too, and the work. One day, now years ago, Angie said to me: “You just don’t seem to enjoy writing very much.” Astonished, I stared at her. But really, it was true. I’d forgotten the love affair, downplayed the pleasure, ignored the thrill. Permission, then, to fall in love again, to be a little foolish about the power of stringing words into images, actions, character, story. Permission to write. No matter what, this day and the next day and the next, to build a life out of that habit, the part not one else can take away from you. This quiet morning before anyone else is awake, when all the words in the world are mine. My one slipper gapes open, its white and fuzzy lining curling in on itself. Kids’ graphic novels scatter around the room. The hushed industrial sounds of heater, refrigerator hum; the tablecloth rumples across the way; this nibbed pen that Angie found cleaning out the garage emits its perfect flow of ink. Permission to love ink, the tactile kinetic act of writing itself, the reader sitting down somewhere, opening an email or a browser or a book and finding the words–love affair with a stranger who reels the words in from the other side, who reads! Permission to read as an affirmation of the mundane and glorious tendency to scratch words in lines into the page. Permission to matter. Permission to declare it done. Permission to send it off into the world again and again. Permission to stand behind it, what that younger, less experienced you pulled off, as you would stand behind the work of a child without expecting it to be more than the best they could do at the time. Permission to risk. Permission to succeed.