Boxcars and Books

Hilda's office at Prairie Schooner is about the size and shape of a railroad car, the kind that run daily through Lincoln, Nebraska, the kind you never fully acknowledge unless you're trapped at a crossing late for work and you're sure every single boxcar in the Great Plains is rolling in front of you going exactly two-and-a-half miles an hour.

Like University of Nebraska football, like the tall, stark spire of the capitol building and the patchwork of corn and soybeans and prairie grass that spreads out from the city's borders, trains are a constant presence in Lincoln, Nebraska. Rails crisscross the city and the university campus and throughout the day and night you can hear the slam of cars being hitched together in the rail yard, or the crash of a wheel being taken off its trucks and dropping like a quarter falling and spinning just so onto a desk, only massive and break-the-sound-barrier loud, that wheel spinning and ringing so long you forget about it until it finally stops and you're startled by the sudden absence of noise. The trains' whistles blow day and night and are best heard in the dark hours of early morning, lonesome and forlorn, whistles that make you wonder how you came to be in Lincoln, Nebraska, how long you might stay, and where you'll head on the day you happen to leave.

Hilda's office also was a place to wonder, but not a place you'd want to leave. And though I called that boxcar room Hilda's office during my entire tenure at Prairie Schooner, Hilda was often quick to remind me that the office was not hers but Prairie Schooner's, and she was simply occupying it at present, as had Wimberly and Shapiro and Slote and Luke before her.

Despite those reminders, all of us—colleagues, students, coworkers, friends—still called it Hilda's office, and we all spent hours sitting in the gunmetal gray chair across from Hilda's chair, next to Hilda's desk, in the light of the only window in the otherwise long, dark room. Because Hilda's desk was placed right at the entrance, beneath that single window, and perhaps because the fluorescent lights above were never turned on in lieu of the much more gracious incandescent floor lamp that made the large room seem as though it was always bathed in twilight, her office sometimes looked as though it could go on forever, as if it weren't one train car but several that you could walk through one by one, each lined with books and literary magazines on metal shelves, the edges of each shelf covered with magnets or bits of tape that held up postcards and baby pictures and articles and poems, a de facto refrigerator door for Hilda to share her pride in all the wonderful words—and the people who put them together—that surrounded us every day at Prairie Schooner.

I loved sitting in that office with Hilda, and I sat there for hours every week as we talked budget and page count and tossed special issue ideas back and forth, as we prepped for board meetings and conferences and brainstormed ideas for subscription mailings and grant requests, as we pondered Pantone colors and bar code placement with designer Dika Eckersley, and of course as we joyfully pulled in staff to share news or thrill over the success of writers we'd published—the Pulitzer! The poet laureate! The Guggenheim! The nea!—and followed even more closely writers who had put in their time at Prairie Schooner as graduate students and were now making their way in the wider world of academia and art.

But, too, we talked about life, which is, after all, what we all wrote about—we talked about love and loss and family and friends, we talked about the endless battle to juggle responsibilities and obligations and expectations. We talked about time and how there never was enough. And when I wasn't in Hilda's office myself, that...