The Paris Review

A Walk with Fame

Inside the church at Tepoztlán

One winter in January, I stood with the Irish poet Paul Muldoon in front of a glass coffin, in the Mexican town of Tepoztlán. Inside, a figure lay under a purple cloth.

“Is that a saint of some kind?” Muldoon asked. “Do you think that’s real?”

I said I doubted it.

“That’s disappointing. Where I come from in Ireland, in the cathedral in Armagh, is the head of blessed Oliver Plunkett. A church without a head is really no church at all,” he said, with the bare trace of a smile. “When your expectations are as high as mine, almost everything is going to be disappointing.”

We had walked to the church together from town, retracing the poet Hart Crane’s footsteps around Tepoztlán. Muldoon walked slowly, his tweed jacket flapping, his brows knit together behind his thick frames. I was nervous and enthusiastic, wanting to make a good impression. I was standing next to a real writer; someone I’d read and admired.

We were in Tepoztlán as part of a writing program—Muldoon was leading a poetry class, I was participating in a cultural journalism workshop. I’d traveled there from Paris, where my husband and I had recently moved for my husband’s work. I’d never been published, despite many dozens of story submissions. I kept a blog, which was read by my mother and three friends. I worked odd, exhausting jobs, determined not to commit myself to any serious work that might get in the way of writing, but was rapidly losing faith in my own potential.

I applied to the program in Mexico one night in Paris after I’d unpacked all my books and placed them on our new bookshelves in the living room. When I was done, my husband asked whether I could clear a bit of space for his mathematics books, which I’d relegated to the

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