I will always thank my lucky stars that I had the great fortune to study with Lyn Hejinian at New College in the 1990s. After finishing my undergraduate degree in English literature at CU Boulder and a year abroad studying in Sweden, I moved to San Francisco in the early nineties. I would frequently walk down Valencia and pause in front of the New College building to read their course offerings posted in the window. Having just attended a massive public university of twenty-four thousand students, the thought of attending a small, progressive, liberal arts college for graduate work focused exclusively on writing and poetics seemed incredibly exciting.

I didn’t know Lyn’s work before my time at New College, but sat in on one of her classes prior to attending that spring. I was immediately blown away by the level of discourse, the interest in innovation, and the excitement for discovery. The whole environment was electric, and I knew it was the place for me. I was working as a technical producer in the newly emerging interactive media sector at the time, which was also brimming with invention, so these two worlds of creative writing and new media aligned brilliantly for me.

I took several workshops and seminars with Lyn, and one of the earliest was called “Poetry Writes Theory,” where I experimented intensely with language, visual, and assemblage poetic forms. Lyn would sometimes bring in special books from her own collection, and two were Robert Grenier’s Sentences (Whale Cloth Press, 1978), and 12 From Rhymms (Pavement Saw Press, 1996). They blew my mind, and I remember thinking, “Wow, this is what poetry can be?!” The possibilities felt limitless.

During my last year at New College, I had a workshop with Lyn entitled “Theorizing the Technical.” We were reading Umberto Eco and Viktor Shklovsky among others, and our class discussions were incredibly fertile. Lyn had a masterful way of asking questions and guiding the conversation to activate the entire room. And her openness to innovation and experimentation invited the most extraordinary student work. I found myself as influenced by the writing of the other graduate students, as the theory or even the other writers we were discussing.

It was during this workshop where I began writing the first half of my manuscript lighthouse. After presenting this work one class session, I vividly remember Lyn asking me across the room, “Did you write all of that this semester?” And in that seemingly small, inconsequential moment, I felt validated. Later that year, to my utter surprise and honor, she along with her publishing partner Travis Ortiz commissioned my book for their Atelos series.

In the end, Lyn taught me as much about writing and thinking as she taught me about how to live a writing life. I will always be grateful for finding my way to San Francisco, to New College, and to Lyn Hejinian, my beloved mentor.