Roxana Robinson

When I was in boarding school I had a wonderful English teacher, Isota Epes. She was from Virginia, deeply intelligent and intellectually sophisticated, and she took writing, and reading, very seriously, as things that should provide us with a kind of profound sustenance. She was also glamorous in every way – she had worked for the OSS, and she had written for Vogue. She came to class beautifully dressed and turned out, so she was someone who demonstrated the complexities of what a woman could do. She asked us to investigate literature at the outer limits of our abilities, to search the texts for elegance, for meanings, for complexity. She asked us to incorporate literature in our lives, to use it as a way to read the world. I was deeply indebted to her for that. Years later, when I published my first story in The New Yorker, under my married name, I received a letter from a reader. She said she had never written a letter like this before, but she had so admired the story that she was moved to write to the author. She said she had never read my work before, but she looked forward to reading more of it. She was, of course, Mrs. Epes, and I wrote back to say that she had read my work before – she had given me an A on my paper on Hamlet. It gave me the most enormous sense of satisfaction, that I could give back to her using the same currency in which she had given me such a profound sense of respect for literature.

http://www.advicetowriters.com/interviews/2015/3/10/roxana-robinson.html