In the fall semester of 2000, I met Michelle and my friend G.* in a required undergraduate Expository Writing course. We bonded over readings and group work and sentence-level analysis, and I have remained close to both of them ever since. The thing about that semester is that all of us were just beginning to figure out what we wanted. Michelle was just coming back to school after several years of child-raising, G. was trying to figure out if she wanted to be a writer instead of a nurse-researcher, and I was wondering if I really wanted to keep pursuing a career in Business Development.

Now, exactly four years later, Michelle has just finished her master‛s and is about to start teaching literature, G. has published a number of essays and stories and is up for a Pushcart, and I‛ve finished three degrees and my first semester of Ph.D. work (nearly).

It hadn‛t occurred to me how much progress we‛d each made until I was talking about it with G. a few weeks ago. Everything has changed, and nothing has changed. We‛re all the same in the fundamental ways - bitchy and determined, in love with our families and husbands and partners, in love with words. But we have come so far from counting syllables in that little dim room and wondering if we might dare to try at all. Now, we are certain.

*They are quite different from each other, not least in their varying desires for anonymity.