During a year of chaos, right after I turned 40, I bought a nearly derelict house in the midst of a desolate meadow in upstate New York. After we closed the deal, I got what I had been so longing for: silence. I had been besieged by e-mail, CNN headlines, phone calls; by my weighty, warm, engulfing responsibilities as wife, mother, teacher. I sat in the desolate house for a whole afternoon, alone, on the wooden floor, missing no one — no context, no family, no computer, no byline, no phone — soaking in the silence.

Night fell. My family back in Manhattan knew I was gone overnight; our babysitter was with the children until David, my husband, could get home. Wildlife of all kinds lived in the forest around the little house — I had heard from a guy at the petrol station down the road that there was one last, lonely mountain lion in the woods — but I felt unafraid. I slept alone on the floor upstairs. I woke up in the morning to see red-gold autumn light against the mountain.

A while later my father came up to help Rosa, my daughter, and me build a treehouse. Rosa, who was then seven, had a baby brother Joey, who did not understand how to stay out of a big sister’s room, and we lived in such a noisy, crowded small apartment in the city; I understood her longing for a place in the trees that no one could get to.

My father wanted us to spend some time learning about wood before we learnt the basics of carpentry, the same way he wanted his poetry students not only to understand grammatical structures, but etymology as well.

My father, Leonard Wolf, is a wild old visionary poet. He changes people’s lives because he believes that everyone is here on earth as an artist; to tell his particular story or sing her irreplaceable song; to leave behind a unique creative signature. He believes that your passion for this, your feelings about this, must take priority over every other reasoned demand: status, benefits, sensible practices.

All my life I have seen how his faith in this possibility — that an artist inheres in everyone — actually does change people’s lives: the students he has taught over the course of four decades are changed, but so are the lives of people who are simply passing through. I have seen how his belief has led people with whom he has come into casual contact — friends of mine, friends of his, strangers he meets on trains — to suddenly drop whatever is holding them back from their real creative destiny and shift course; to become happier.

When people spend time around my dad, they are always quitting their sensible jobs with good benefits to become schoolteachers, or agitators, or lutenists. I have seen students of his leave high-paying jobs that were making them miserable, or high-status social positions that had been scripted by their families, and follow their hearts in the face of every kind of opposition.

My father believes in placing passionate love at the very top of your list of priorities, and in making room for passion at the centre of your romantic life, no matter how domestic it is. He believes no one should settle for less. His students are always leaving safe but not essential relationships and finding something truer — whether it is a fierce attachment to someone they would have overlooked before as being “unsuitable”, or whether it is taking the risk of solitude in a renewed search for their soul’s real mate.

During the time he and I worked on Rosa’s treehouse, we talked in a way that I had been too busy — or rather, resistant — to do since I was a girl. As we hammered and sanded, Leonard talked about his favourite poems, what they meant to him, the lessons they held. After each conversation I found that his insights called me, uncomfortably but unmistakably, to re-evaluate my own life.

Finally I decided I did not want to get just the glimmers of insight scattered here and there; I wanted him to teach me, formally, what he had taught his students for the decades during which he gave a famous class in poetry and creative writing at San Francisco State University.

He obliged me by finding his yellowed lecture notes. They came down to 12 basic lessons. It was awkward, after 15 years of expressing my own opinions for a living, to be once again an unskilled learner. But I realised — slowly and painfully, because I did not want to at first — that everything sensible that had ever guided me rightly was there in the 12 lessons.

I realised that when I had gone astray it was because I had deliberately ignored, or insisted on forgetting, as daughters do who are trying to forge their own identity in the world, one of those 12 lessons about literature — lessons that are really, or equally, about life.

As a child I had adored listening to him; of course, he knew everything. As a teenager I had taken on board what he had to say about poetry and the well-lived life, and had taken seriously a kind of apprenticeship with him.