On a cool Halloween night, I stood atop Summit Hill outside of Boston, watching my ten-year-old son dressed as Superman bumble up the darkened street with his friends. One boy lurched forward dressed as a refrigerator in his lit-up cardboard box; another hoisted a hobo’s stick over his shoulder, his eyes blackened with coal. As I waited on the cold grass, contemplating the hard fact that I’d have to sell my condo as a single mother who couldn’t keep up with mortgage payments, I had no idea how much I needed community—or how stubbornly I would resist it.
I had spent two years teaching at Boston University and writing a novel about Helen Keller’s secret love affair, hunched over a desk crammed into my kitchen corner while laundry thumped in the dryer beyond. I wrote alone on Christmas Eve while my son slept, alone during sweltering Boston summers, alone through rejection after rejection from literary agents. I did have a writing partner with whom I met to share chapters and get feedback, but did not share the manuscript with anyone else out of fear of criticism.