Verse of Your Own: Letters on Becoming

When you read this, there will be machines that can answer almost anything you ask them - faster than I can, faster than your teachers can, faster than you ever will.

In an age when so much can be generated, a father sits down to hand his daughter the things no machine can live for her.

A Verse of Your Own is not a parenting manual or a how-to. It is twenty-six letters - written to be read at six, at sixteen, and at sixty - from a father to his daughter, on how to become a whole person in a world that will keep trying to answer that question for her.

The letters move through the things that stay scarce no matter how cheap the machines become: how to see yourself clearly, without flattering or shrinking yourself. How to read people, and hear what is never on the page. How to make yourself safe to lose, then go looking for what you can win. How to say no, hold a line, and stay gentle with those who fall. Where you came from, and why it steadies you. And - when everything can be done quickly - why the one who thinks still wins.

Quiet, unhurried, and built to last, these are not rules to follow. They are a shelf to live beside - a steady voice a child can return to at any age, and find something waiting that fits.

The first of The Highbank Letters.