Kelly McMasters: “My own writing, meanwhile, was like a distant song.” March 17, 2021 The first time I confessed aloud to being a single mother, I was talking to Rebecca Solnit. She’d come as a guest speaker to my university as part of our MFA reading series and we met before her event so I could interview her for our literary magazine. We’d spent an hour together, first examining the old black-and-white photographs on the walls in the austere conference room, laughing conspiratorially about the ratio of men to women in the images. She recounted some esoteric historical fact about Holland, because she is Rebecca Solnit, and we sat down at the glossy lacquered table, the kind I’d recently grown accustomed to in my divorce lawyer’s offices, the same impenetrable glaze atop the same piss-yellow wood.