The assignment I gave for the writing workshop I facilitate was this: Imagine you knock on the door of your favorite writer. He/she opens the door. You hand him/her a stack of stuff you've written. Say: " I'll be back in a week to talk about this. " Then you race away.

The assignment was based on something the young Edward Albee actually did. The writer whose door he knocked on was W.H. Auden.

One of the students this morning imagined she knocked on Graham Greene's door. What did Graham Greene say to her a week later? After he had read what she'd written?

" Continue to write this stuff, if you must. "

Monica has a Dorothy Parker like wit. She made a name for herself in the fashion industry, had a whole department named after her at Bergdorf-Goodman. She's known a lot of rich and famous people, but by looking at her, you'd never guess how she survived in that Big Apple, Big Ego cutthroat world. She's tiny. She's soft spoken. But then she lets go with one of those zingers, and you say to yourself:

That's how she survived.