what was your most formative reading experience? a decade ago while undergoing starvation in France and living on 50 cents a day, I was staying with friends in Nice on the Riviera and encountered Walt Whitman. I’d spent two days’ budget on a 1 euro copy of the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass and woke early, 5am, with the dawn. the next two hours, reading with the sun rising and warming me, were the intensest of my life. no other of my loves, not Bellow nor Munro nor James nor Proust nor Eliot nor Hopkins nor Stevens nor Donne nor even Shakespeare has so entered my mind with their language. i think of whitman every day. i have perhaps 500 lines of him in my memory always.