If my house were burning down, I would grab artwork, my book, and the notebooks I wrote in Anya’s classes. If you’re looking for an average writing teacher or editor, go elsewhere. Anya resides in the upper stratosphere of creativity and, if you let her, will lift your writing to heights you never dreamed possible. I won the 2006 New Mexico Discovery Award, first prize in non-fiction, for a story I began in Anya’s class. I divide my writing into two phases: pre-Anya and post-Anya. There is no comparison.

Your voice as a writer and teacher makes the strands of space that connects more visible. You do that when you teach I think, evoke the deep hidden layers of meaning, the interstices of silence where potent stories reside and you tease them from others by the way you speak, the way you hint at the interweavings within a life, a character’s perceptions, the nuances of truth.