Joyce Carol Oates is stunned to find me at the restaurant. Just minutes before, she was told that all the trains between New York and Princeton, New Jersey, had been cancelled. I found this out the hard way, and spent a woozy 90 minutes in a taxi instead.
“I really didn’t think that you’d be here,” she says. She later chalks my presence up to a journalist’s determination, whereas “writers and poets can be expected to vacillate, dither and postpone”.
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