I teach Virginia Woolf to fourth-year students in the English Department at the University of Ethics in the middle part of the globe. I have a lot of fun explaining her technique to a hundred eager students by always beginning with my own stream of consciousness which is triggered by the word Glasgow. A string of images flows beginning with the swans at Knightswood Park and culminating in a cup of Earl Grey tea with a buttered scone. Sometimes I use a word indicating a colour such as blue to initiate a varied current of thoughts: my father’s favorite colour, his clothes, swimming in the Mediterranean and other childhood joys, the blue of Our Lady and Loch Lomond where I first rowed a boat. White takes me to St. Mungo at Townhead where I first encountered masses of snow, the frozen Clyde River, my first date, and Roslin where I made the acquaintance of mute swans. A student who attempts to steer my streams away from Scotland suggests the word yellow to see where that might take my liquid thoughts. I begin with the sun and warmth, the bonfires of my camps as a Girl Scout, the gold sheets of the pharaohs’ coffins at the Museum of Cairo, the medieval flag of Jerusalem, then the daffodils of the Lake District, where I had my only holiday while living in Glasgow. With a grin, my student shakes her head and suggests a new word, death, which is a prominent theme in Virginia Woolf’s work. I never pause to contrive a stream of consciousness that is false, so I let the words come unchecked in response to a very bleak point: my father’s death, my boyfriend’s, my German Shepherd’s, elegies, tributes and odes I wrote, my first published poem in an anthology which was mailed to me as a surprise gift by post: from a Mr. Doyle in Glasgow…