Heather Christle @heatherchristle Twitter profile

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

4 years

I am allowed to type "grey" and "gray" in the same paragraph because they are two different colors.

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

2 years

Six years ago today I stayed in an old-fashioned inn and was awoken in the middle of the night by the sound of a mouse trying to unwrap a Lindt chocolate truffle. I had never seen the truffle before. It was the mouse’s truffle.

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

4 years

Woolf, The Years

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

3 years

What do you remember of the library where you grew up?

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

9 months

I am reading Walden for the first time in my life and I cannot stop giggling at how Thoreau begins this chapter.

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

2 years

@Danez_Smif Once a first grader asked me how long a poem had to be and when I said it could be just one word he wrote a poem that was just his best friend’s phone number. 💖

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

6 years

Once a 6-yr-old asked me how long a poem had to be. "As long or short as it needs to be," I said. "Even just one word!" "Can it be a number?" he asked. "YES." He went back to work at his desk and returned with a perfect poem in 7 digits: his best friend's phone number.

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

2 years

In school, 8-year-old was asked about her strengths, and this was (one part of) her answer.

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

3 years

For the archive

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

7 years

when psychological researchers from 1897 write a poem by mistake--"Death, Funeral and Burial of Dolls"--and you have to go lie down for the rest of the day

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

3 years

I am in Virginia Woolf’s garden and wondering what would happen if I were to eat one of Virginia Woolf’s apples.

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

2 years

@cj_sheu I should have! I did ask it where it came from and where it got the truffle. The mouse had no comment.

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

2 years

@benjamintclark It’s best to keep an open mind at this point in the investigations.

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

3 years

Normalize the compulsion to send multiple texts not bc of growing urgency but bc of the need for the line or stanza break in the rhythm of the conversation

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

3 years

I remember the loudness of the yellow on the Nancy Drew shelf & the foam chairs we built into a blue velvet fort & using my chin to hold my stack of books & elders gathered in a square of armchairs turning the pages of their magazines as if they were in the world’s quietest band.

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

2 years

I am looking at Mastodon like a new kid holding a lunch tray in the cafeteria with no fucking clue of where to sit and a great longing to go back to my old school except that one got a new principal who is terrible.

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

2 years

7 year old came home from school saying "We got to make similes and metaphors about the moon! Would you like to hear mine?" and I had to stop myself from shaking her and screaming YES.

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

6 years

Hey it's the anniversary of the moon landing, so here is my elegy for Neil Armstrong, created by removing words from the NASA transcript of the moment, as printed in an old children's textbook.

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

1 year

[Please note the below engages with the subject of suicide.] Virginia Woolf died on this day, 82 years ago. By "this day," I mean March 28 & I mean Tuesday, the first word of the note she left behind. I often wish I did not know this word, nor those that followed.

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

2 years

Today is Virginia Woolf’s birthday. One hundred years and three days ago she wrote this in her room on Paradise Road.

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

2 years

Casual side note that—in addition to tweets about mice—I also write whole entire books, i.e.

The Crying Book a book by Heather Christle

NATIONAL BESTSELLER "A poignant and piercing examination of the phenomenon of tears--exhaustive, yes, but also open-ended. . . A deeply felt, and genuinely touching, book." --Esmé Weijun Wang, author...

bookshop.org

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

3 years

What if the need to read were automatically understood as a legitimate reason for not tending to other things. You just hold up a book and everyone nods and moves on without you.

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

6 years

@KavehAkbar I do not play chess and so I am grateful for this helpful, informative diagram of how to set up my body correctly.

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

8 months

You GUYS it is OCTOBER I have been dressing in WOOL and TIGHTS and CORDUROY I am going to the LIBRARY to pick up SEVERAL INTRIGUING VOLUMES It is almost my BIRTHDAY MY POWERS INCREASETH EXPONENTIALLY

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

3 years

We have been at home with our now-6-year-old nearly constantly since March. We have invented and played a lot of games. Yesterday she said “After lunch, do you want to go looking for lost memories?” So that’s how we’re doing.

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

7 years

We are letting Ohio GOP know we see them and their disregard for people's health. @indivisibledyt @IndivisibleTeam

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

6 years

Once trying to flirt with a guy in my MFA I found a used book about how to care for gerbils and (without bothering to read it) put it in his English Department mailbox. Years later I found out that all the mentions of gerbil mating habits had been underlined by a previous reader.

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

3 years

Oh and I just remembered from an earlier library/town, I was four and wanted to try out this sentence I heard the grownups using, so I grabbed a book at random and was like “Oh I’ve been LOOKING for a book about…*checks cover*…where babies come from!”

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

1 year

Asked to describe what these trees were doing to the sky, 8 year old replied “translating it.”

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

2 years

I wrote a whole draft of the whole book. I typed the last sentence of the last chapter in the closet and then I read it out loud in the kitchen, and in both places it was made entirely of words, and they were real, and I know, because I checked them with my teeth.

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

3 years

“I’m here. I’m live. I’m not a cat,” I say to the mirror each morning.

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

4 months

James Schuyler, as is tradition.

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

1 year

Help me think of essays, poems, short stories that are driven by avoidance?

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

2 years

@Danez_Smif Yes—his best friend’s name. (My heart has not recovered.)

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

3 years

On our walk to school this morning, during which we were discussing the effects of articulating several possible vehicles for a simile, 7-year-old sighed, “I wonder what life would be like if you weren’t a poet.”

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

3 years

A thousand tiny griefs for the details of childhoods lost to the pandemic. Clapping games. Whispers in a friend’s ear. Trading snacks. Leaning on a classmate during story time.

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

2 years

Being a person is too embarrassing; I’m some geese now.

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

4 years

how tender parentheses are

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

3 years

tfw you are Vita Sackville-West & yr mother has dressed you as “a basket of westeria.”

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

3 years

It seems thoughtless and cruel for the US to abandon masks when young kids--the people who have had the greatest portion of their lives disrupted by the pandemic--cannot get vaccinated. A 5-year-old, for instance, has lived 25% of their life under pandemic conditions.

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

9 months

Today writing feels like convincing the ocean to pass through a garden hose.

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

1 month

In light of everything this bit of news is small, but it comes on a day when I am beginning another phase of hospitalization, and I wanted to take a moment to step outside of this strange medical atmosphere to say proudly that this book is, at long last, officially on its way!

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

2 years

How familiar to you is the word "folly" as an architectural term?

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

3 years

Is there a sentence you would consider living in?

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

3 years

Books are a pyramid scheme. Reading one means you are then required to read eight others and those eight others require you to read sixty-four others and so on until you are dead and they bury you in a pyramid-shaped library.

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

6 years

[making a grocery list] me: what do we want to eat for dinner this week? 4-yr-old: POETRY!

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

3 years

"And what shall we do, we who did not die? What shall we do now?" -June Jordan

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

3 years

People have a lot of library memories! I’m putting them all together in one giant imaginary structure in my head and it’s pretty wild. (There’s a whole floor dedicated to the Smell.)

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

4 years

whoa

Fee Griffin

@EffGriff

4 years

Found an astonishingly prescient poem from @heatherchristle in this summer 2018 copy of The Poetry Review. @PoetrySociety

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

3 years

‘Revise the poem as if you were a gorilla grooming the body of another gorilla you love very much’ is a sentence I found myself typing yesterday.

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

7 years

Sign at my local café today. We are everywhere. Let's keep calling! @indivisibledyt @IndivisibleTeam

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

6 years

Also, if a child ever asks you a question beginning with "Can a poem..." the answer is pretty much always YES.

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

8 months

Has anyone noticed that making art while being a person is hard? We should look into this.

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

2 years

Sentience is when a sentence grows an I.

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

7 years

If you put a poem on a wall where you can read it every day it will start to change you.

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

2 years

Pretty great feeling to get to bring one’s 100+ pounds of books back to the library, having finished a draft of a book one has been working on for 3+ years

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

6 years

So happy to share this news! THE CRYING BOOK, my first work of nonfiction, will be published by Catapult.

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

2 years

@Danez_Smif Yeah—I had to work VERY hard not to melt right there onto the linoleum floor.

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

3 years

Dreamt that in his letters Keats would sign off with the word “soft.” Like so: Soft, John Keats

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

2 years

This is a picture of what the book in my head looks like, which is related to but not the same as the book that will some day be released into the wild.

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

3 years

If I wrote copy for real estate, every time I was listing a house on some kind of slope I would start with THIS IS THE HILL YOU WANT TO DIE ON.

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

1 year

Let’s pretend Virginia Woolf predicted Twitter.

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

2 years

I just found my high school laptop and turned it on and I am afraid to open these files.

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

2 years

@susannahwise I would like to give that mouse a tiny Olivier

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

3 years

New poetry manuscript is assembled so now I'm just waiting for someone to come pour Gatorade on my head.

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

2 years

New pastime: find and obey all the cemetery’s commands.

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

2 years

7-year-old--who has had some recent public recognition of her poetry--informed us last night that she plans to continue writing poems, but "not as a career."

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

2 years

I have almost no memory of drinking water as a child.

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

4 years

What I like is an accidental narrative poem in the examples section of my favorite dictionary

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

2 years

Did you know you can schedule yourself so tightly that your thoughts become pressed like flowers in a book?

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

4 years

What’s a line of poetry you would be happy to pull from an envelope and read for the first time? (I’m making some mail to send to my students as a way to create a haptic connection across digital distance.)

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

3 years

Your favorite poems in the form of instructions?

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

3 years

Still can’t believe that yesterday I sat on the steps of Woolf’s garden writing lodge and worked on my book. Cannot have been real.

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

2 years

OKAY vibernum we GET it

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

6 years

I think I will always marvel when a poem happens. I hope a poem happens to an abundance of people today.

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

3 years

Hello fellow fools and poets today is really Our Day 🐣

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

3 years

Deleting the right word from a sentence is as satisfying as tweezing a hair.

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

3 years

Tell me what you believe about paragraphs.

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

5 years

4-year-old: [literally hugging tree] “You are my FAVORITE tree in the WHOLE world, because you are COVERED in MOSS and LICHEN!”

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

2 years

If I am teaching a course on “Writing in the Garden” I am essentially required to buy this dress, no?

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

1 year

Everybody cries on airplanes that's literally what they're for

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

4 years

first known usage of “unruly” predates “ruly” and I like that

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

6 years

Happy Valentines Day from Lakoff and Johnson’s list of entailments for the metaphor “LOVE IS A COLLABORATIVE WORK OF ART”

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

4 years

One of the best things in life is when you set down the bottle of dish detergent on the kitchen counter a little more forcefully than intended and a tiny bubble floats up into the air and stays there for longer than seems reasonable.

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

6 years

Imagine if, in order to make use of them, poets had to physically gather the material objects whose names appeared in their poems.

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

3 years

Today is my birthday and now I look like this.

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

2 years

Today is international women’s day and here is a poem I wrote about women and swans.

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

3 years

In my solitude I have figured out a reading system for my chaotic brain: each room in the house has a different book I am in the middle of. And nobody moves them! They stay in their assigned spaces!

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

3 years

When you pretend you are a "Written Exercise" in a 1950s German language textbook but you are actually a sonnet:

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

2 years

I wrote a poem. This is my favorite part of writing prose: when I stop. Do you know how good poems are? They are as good as or better than horses.

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

7 years

The waiting room outside heaven is decorated with all the houseplants you've killed.

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

6 years

Love you, line breaks. Love you, English signs. Love you, wild deer.

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

6 years

Anyway, now we’re married and I just wanted to pass on this excellent flirting strategy to anyone who wants to use it.

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

2 years

@emmastraub It is a tradition they have. From Virginia Woolf’s 1928 introduction to ORLANDO—

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

3 years

I have a new poem up today at The Nation! (Gratitude to Kaveh.) You know what I like? Endings, that’s what. Poets are lucky; we get to make so many endings. Poor novelists. Such abstinence!

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

3 years

They said I could pick one!

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

3 years

my mother’s birthday, 1973 + my birthday, 2021

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

4 years

“Am I blurry today?” is a question I just heard my child’s teacher ask. Now it is a question I am asking myself. I think the answer is yes.

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

3 years

Just tried to hit refresh on my word doc to see if any more of my book had been written since I last checked.

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Heather Christle

@heatherchristle

3 years

Today a nice person tweeting about reading The Crying Book led to us realizing that his mother was the nurse who attended my birth and I think that is pretty neat.

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