It’s been hard to start because I don’t know what to say or how to say it. There are so many facets and so many stories.

There’s Alice the poet and teacher. I first met Alice when I went to her workshop in the late 70s. She of course would remember what year. The workshop was a treat—so many ideas bouncing around. New people to meet, new poets to read. Afterward, most of us went out for drinks, and thus she and I became friends.

How did Alice write so much? How did Bernadette, how does Anne? It seems almost unfathomable to me that one can create a poem at all, and these three extraordinarily generous and prolific poets did it every day while raising children and engaging with partners, giving readings, teaching, publishing, and scratching out a living.

There was the social Alice, who met me for lunch and cooked dinner for me on Friday nights before Steve Carey’s workshop. For a long time, Alice and Ted didn’t have a phone, so dinner was the time for me to tell her about last Friday’s workshop, to talk to Ted and Anselm and Edmund, to hear what all of them were up to.

Alice was an artist too. She made book covers, watercolors and collages, including her wonderful fan collages. They were made of bits and scraps, bright slivers she often found on the street. She said it was harder to make them in Paris than in New York, because the streets were cleaner.

Much later, after Ted’s death and when Alice had married Doug and the boys had gone away to school, she moved to Paris. I hated the whole idea! But after a short time writing letters, too few, too short, we realized that we could telephone, and we did.

Here’s where Alice the storyteller really flourished. Yes, we had dipped into our histories before, we knew the main outlines, but now we elaborated. Alice talked about her travels in Morocco, a brief flit to Canada, going to Iowa thinking she’d write stories. The tales might be pretty short, but she caught the moments, and one memory often led to another, from Bolinas or Chicago or Essex.

But my favorite stories came from Needles. To a Brooklynite, the Mojave was exotic. To Alice, it was home, land of family, neighbors, local characters, teachers and schoolmates, just as Park Slope is to me. I liked hearing about playing in the gully, swimming in the Colorado, going to the movies almost every Saturday for a double feature. Alice had a terrific memory and could tell me the stars and plots of a surprising number of movies, though she thought they were generally forgettable.

She told me about her days in Paris and about her current projects. People sought blurbs and interviews and coffee dates. We brought each other up-to-date on the events of the week.

Marion and I wonder now if we will ever know any gossip anymore. She knew what was happening here far better than we did.

I’ve noticed since Alice’s death that I still frame stories to tell her. It’s part of the rhythm of my days, and I hope it takes a long time to fade.