This fall I spoke with listeners at the Twin Cities Book Festival about the place of poetry in their lives.

This week we're sharing their stories. My name is Margaret Hasi, rhymes with Lassie, and I live right here in St. Paul, Minnesota.

So you like puns?

I like things that rhyme sometimes, even though.

That helps with memory.

We all are bustling around and our minds jumbled and

going into so many different directions that I think you only find peace and

depth in a life when you do slow down and as many people have said including Mary Oliver

to pay attention.

We're born to pay attention to the world.

I'm a writer and I taught for many years at the

Loft Literary Center and then I taught in prisons and now I have an online

freelance group that's registers and I teach by Zoom. Zoom is my room now. My mother

liked poetry very much and read to me when I was young.

So I feel I was destined to love poetry.

I loved her voice.

I loved her.

And the choices that she made to read aloud

were really extraordinary of great

varieties. So I was an English major then of course and went on for my master's

degree in English so that's how I came to write was when I was very young. I started writing poetry and high school and college and I guess a lot of people write when they're young and they they stop but I never stopped. Everybody has a voice and we we deserve each human

being deserves to have explored that voice and bring it bring it to themselves first of all and then to others if they want to form a small

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