In an early grad school poetry workshop, a friend of mine turned in a poem in which she described a homeless person, and her professor, Phillip Levine, irate, told her that she had used the person as furniture, and I have thought about this many times a day since she told me.

It gets to an ethics underlying creative writing that we don’t talk about enough. His comment made her aware (& by her confession, me) of something I now view as a cardinal sin. People are not decorative elements, nor are they inventions to prove some point or provide an emotion.

I’m reading an anthology now of best flash nonfiction, and I wish the editors had been thinking of this in their selections.