Summary

“Bella, a middle-aged woman, emerges from the darkness” (7).

Speaking of herself in the third person, Bella introduces herself to the audience as “a middle-aged professor of undergraduate Creative Writing at a prestigious Ivy League university” (7). She imagines how the audience will respond to what she has to say, and after describing – in analytical language – how literary writers often describe their characters, she describes herself as “the equivalent of a collectible plate mounted on a wall” (8).

Bella then sets the time in which she is speaking as her present – specifically, late fall. In present tense narration, she describes the heavy snow, the leafless trees, the darkness of night, and how a nearby lamppost “knows more about [her] than most of [her] students” (9). She describes coming to this particular place – a park called New Haven Green – when she is unable to sleep and needs to talk...