In her New York Public Library conversation with Paul Holdengräber, which also gave us her no-nonsense advice to aspiring writers, Strayed recounts her brush with this life-saving power of poetry and reads the first poem from Adrienne Rich’s 1977 masterwork The Dream of a Common Language ( public library), titled “Power.” Folded into this nuanced homage to Marie Curie - a woman who died a “martyr to science” after a lifetime of crusading for curiosity and - is an exquisite meditation on what power really means: “But poetry is a glass of water, perhaps even a single drop that will save your life.” That’s precisely what poetry became for Cheryl Strayed as she hiked a thousand miles on the Pacific Crest Trail to put herself in the way of truth and beauty in a thoroughly transformative experience that became the magnificent memoir Wild that then became a major motion picture. “Stories are a meal,” one wise father told his eight-year-old daughter a long time ago.
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