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Maria Hummel is the author of the novels Wilderness Run, Motherland, Still Lives, and Lesson in Red (Counterpoint Press, 2021) and of House and Fire, winner of the APR/Honickman First Book Prize in poetry. Her work was also featured in the 2012 Pushcart Prize anthology, and she was a finalist in Narrative’s Second Annual Poetry Contest. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow in poetry, Hummel is an assistant professor at the University of Vermont and lives in Vermont with her husband and sons.

Best Advice

by Maria Hummel

Before I could decipher letters on my own, I curled up in the crook of my mother’s arm and listened to her read Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories. “How the Whale Got His Throat” was my top request. It gave me a line that holds a place in my heart alongside my white plastic Easter basket and a long-lost shelf of dolls: You must never forget the suspenders.

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