'It is important for me to be standing here on this particular day because I feel like it is a kind of bridge. By a strange and wonderful piece of happenstance, today—July 3rd—lies between Fay’s birth date on 4 July 1933 (an auspicious date for an Americanist to have come into the world) and the date she died—2 July 2017. And I am going to be thinking about bridges today—bridges between what is on the public record and what is hidden, bridges between poetry and prose, bridges between interiority (the buried life of the imagination) and the artifact (what surfaces from that imagination), bridges from one writer’s (or artist’s) work to another, and bridges between the living and the dead.' (Introduction)