The writing of Kathleen McGookey shines more brightly than most fine things we feel pleasure to read. Celebrate it!

I think the job of writing and literature is to encourage each one of us to believe that we're living in a story.

I Still Have Everything You Gave Me It is dusty on the edges. It is slightly rotten. I guard it without thinking. I focus on it once a year when I shake it out in the wind. I do not ache. I would not trade.

Teaching and writing are separate, but serve/feed one another in so many ways. Writing travels the road inward, teaching, the road out - helping OTHERS move inward - it is an honor to be with others in the spirit of writing and encouragement.

Anyone who says, “Here’s my address, write me a poem,” deserves something in reply. So I’ll tell you a secret instead: poems hide. In the bottoms of our shoes, they are sleeping. They are the shadows drifting across our ceilings the moment before we wake up. What we have to do is live in a way that lets us find them.

Getting over what you did to me is not why I get out of bed anymore.

I'm writing mostly to thank you for living you eighty years and to tell you I love you and think of you often.