“Paint By Number, Detail” (Silver Spring, Maryland)

This is a detail from a vintage paint-by-number I bought the last summer of the National Book Foundation Summer Writing Camp on the campus of Bennington College. I was a writer-counselor, which meant I played den mother, photocopied poems for the  workshops, taught one mini-workshop, and gave a reading. We weren’t supposed to go off campus, but we knew camp was ending so two other writer-counselors and I went traipsing around Burlington to a used book store, a lunch spot, and a winery. I found the PBN in a giant antiques barn and carried it back in my luggage from Vermont to New York City and finally to Maryland.