August 16, 2002

Woman of La Mancha

By CATHERINE E. SHOICHET

When Karin Bolender read a Wallace Stevens essay claiming that every writer must reckon with Don Quixote, she took him at his word.

Ms. Bolender, who will begin graduate school in creative writing at Hollins University this fall, saddled up her donkey, Aliass, in June on a quest, she says, to "take the making of epic poetry out of the hermitage and onto the road" and to "blast the imagination out into reality." Starting in William Faulkner's hometown, Oxford, Miss., she rode her donkey