TENNESSEE WILLIAMS FIRST VISITED New Orleans at the end of 1938, when he was twenty-seven years old. “Here surely is the place that I was made for if any place on this funny old world,” he wrote in his journal. After seven weeks of exploring the French Quarter and enjoying its Bohemian life, his restless spirit took hold and he headed west. Three years later, he returned to New Orleans, where—“writing a great deal and not badly I believe”—he produced a number of poems, two short stories, and several one-act plays.

What follows are the authors’ discussions on the first stirrings, the germination of a poem, or a work of fiction. Any number of headings would be appropriate: Beginnings, The Starting Point, etc. Inspiration would be as good as any.

My earliest memories revolve around a handsome white house in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, built by a sea captain toward the middle of the nineteenth century. It rests midway down a low-lying rise called Money Hill. Perhaps money had once been buried there; in any event its illustrious owner, EW, never had enough of it-due to financially irresponsible habits that included not paying income taxes, the lavish use of taxis (he never learned to drive) and the long-distance telephone.

I was almost fifteen. I was working at my first real job at a place called the Spudnut Shop, a doughnut store, in Union Gap, Washington, June of 1955. This very good looking young man walked in with

It would be neat to claim I played Billy Jester, but in fact I was just a forest ranger, Hank, in the chorus, Jester’s sidekick. I brought to my part a decent baritone voice

On May 31, 1997, Daniel Lombardo drove from his home, in West Hampton, Massachusetts—a small hill town above the Connecticut River—to the Jones Library, in Amherst, where he has worked as the curator of special collections since 1983. The Jones Library has a privately endowed collection of local historical and literary documents, and Lombardo has devoted much of his professional life to Amherst’s most famous resident, Emily Dickinson. He is the author of a recent study, “A Hedge Away: The Other Side of Emily Dickinson’s Amherst.”

My birthday falls on June 16, which on the Chinese lunar calendar is an auspicious date. It was the date when Guan Yin, the bodhisattva who possessed the power to relieve the masses of their sufferings, became enlightened. Things didn’t quite turn out to be auspicious for me.

June 4, 1989 

A massacre took place in the capital city of the People’s Republic of China. The size of it shocked the world. Nobody knows precisely how many innocent people lost their lives. The government put the number of “collateral deaths” at two hundred or less. But many Chinese believe that it was more like three thousand innocent students and residents who were slain. 

Mrs. Francesca —who never heard of you —got a message from Ouija for me. Nobody’s hands were on it —but hers— and it told us to be married —that we were soul-mates. Theosophists think that two souls are incarnated together— not necessarily at the same time, but are mated —since the time when people were bisexual;