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Authors need many kinds of help. I learned this when my first child was a week old and I had to make the hour-and-a-half-long drive from Davis to Berkeley to conduct an interview for a magazine article I’d been assigned. I loaded the van with my newborn, my visiting mother-in-law, the diaper bag, a stroller, a tape recorder, and a steno pad. Helen took David and all the baby gear to the University of California art library while I went off to be a journalist. I thought she should share the byline. I am indebted to many people, without whom Black Eye would not exist. Some of the most important, including my sons, my mother-in-law, my sister Shelly, my therapists, my lawyer, and a number of friends, appear—with fictitious names—in the narrative, and I won’t break their cover here. Others, who provided essential support in the early to mid1980s when I struggled with cancer, small children, and a difficult marriage , include Karen Dummer, Betty MacDonald, Amy Nickles, Jeanne Vergeront, and other early members of the Board of Directors of the Madison Children’s Museum, as well as Bert Adams, Pat Anderson, and my colleagues at the Wisconsin Educational Communications Board. Oncologists Saul Rosenberg and Henry Kaplan at Stanford Hospital and Tom Davis at the University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinics literally saved my life. In 1987 and 1988 the University of Wisconsin offered me support as a “returning adult woman student,” and my first writing teacher, Ron Wallace, convinced me that I really was a poet. When I decided to try to shape my experience into a book, Joan Drury and Kelly Kager made my time at Norcroft: A Writing Retreat for Women truly astonishing. Sharon Dynak and the staffs of the Ucross Foundation and Vermont Studio Center gave me similar gifts in Wyoming and Vermont. And my colleagues at Wisconsin Public Radio— especially Molly Bentley, Deborah Bilder, Mary Lou Finnegan, Jim Fleming, Marv Nonn, Steve Paulson, and Anne Strainchamps of To the 349 Acknowledgments Best of Our Knowledge—encouraged me to take time off to write, even when it made their own work more difficult. I’m especially grateful to those who have read and commented on various drafts of Black Eye. Robin Chapman gently insisted that I take the story beyond its original journal form. Susan Elbe, Ann Hoyt, Jesse Lee Kercheval, Celeste Robins, Heather Sellers, Alison Townsend, Alan Venable, and Gail Venable offered valuable critical suggestions. Thanks also to the poet friends and critics extraordinaire who’ve encouraged me to write and to improve my poems through the years: Robin Chapman, Anne-Marie Cusac, Susan Elbe, Rasma Haidri, Catherine Jagoe, Jesse Lee Kercheval, Sara Parrell, Alison Townsend, and Susan Wicks. And to the Biking Babes, especially Diane Lauver, Liz McBride, Kathy Waack, and Janet Zimmerman, who keep me pedaling, whatever the weather, toward a better life. Acknowledgments 350 ...

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