By Peter Anderson In the dream, I was teaching a class with Wallace Stegner, once known as “the dean of Western writers,” and it wasn’t going well. Standing up in front of the students, I was thumbing through an anthology, trying to locate a poem I wanted to share with them, but the font was too small and I had misplaced my glasses. Stegner was patient and dignified as one might expect from such a grandfatherly figure, but he did clear his throat once or twice while I struggled to decipher the hieroglyphics that were swimming across the page. Fortunately, ...