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fcjone'r BOOK OF £Ar//vGf A standard question in literary life is "What book most influenced you on your path to becoming a writer?" Many answers are possible, and the wonderful thing is that any book might be the most important at the moment you are reading. But overall, I realize I have an odd answer: The most important book for me was the first one I wrote—or helped write. My parents called it Lost Words, and it was a compendium of the unusual things the four children in my family said when we were small. Both our parents were teachers, especially alert to what we said. In his own dailywriting my father wrote down his favorites. This book is important not because it is unusuallybrilliant. Every child I have met has unique insights and ways of expressing them. But Lost Words was our book. The ideas between its covers were our own philosophic landscape, and the language was our collective creation . My brother, Bret, my sisters, Kit and Barbara, and I together challenged each other to figure out the world, sentence by sentence and question by question. Just because our father was the famous poet in the family did not mean we weren't allthinkers, writers, makers of culture. In Lost Words democratic inclusion started in the family and became my career. I cherish this record, and my own habit of writing down the daily wonders of conversation may have its source in this custom from home. Kit looking at modern art: "These are just sort

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