––If you could go back and be someone’s first kiss, who would it be and why?

Albo: This beautiful, crazy poet boy who worked on the high school literary magazine with me. He lived near me. I would pick him up in my ‘79 Maverick (previously owned by my tinkering Grandpa, it lasted about 6 months under my rule) and we would go sit in parks and at the train tracks at night. He was a fantastic writer. He knew so much about contemporary poetry, and introduced me to For the Union Dead, 45 Mercy Street, and Ariel.

I owe him so much, now that I think about him. He and his language were so free and scraping. We would do these free writing exercises together with this heavily intelligent, possibly Jewish girl with blue spellbinding eyes. The poet boy was pale and had a long Italian nose and a thinly defined body. One time under a tree at night in one of our parks, it started raining hard and he came up and put his head on my chest and his arms around me. I don’t know why we never ended up kissing, but now I have a well-equipped post-production facility that re-animates and reworks my past all the time, so I have revised the memory, and under that tree I put my hands in his hair and kiss him.

Hollander: You’re not asking who I wish I’d kissed, but who I wish had kissed me, right? In this scenario, the kiss isn’t necessarily my first, but hers. It would have been nice to have been Theresa Hattemer’s first kiss. I liked her and she liked me, all through junior high school and high school, but I was an idiot and too chickenshit to trust that kissing was in the realm of Possible Things. Mostly I just poked her at random intervals. If I had been experienced, then maybe it would have been nice to introduce someone else to kissing, in a sweetly romantic way that I imagine characterizes someone else’s adolescent experience. But since I was a buffoon, at least until well beyond the age of normal first kisses, all I could ever do was fantasize and masturbate and wonder. To be someone else’s first kiss in this unfortunate reality would only have meant to confuse them, as I no doubt did Vanessa, with my shame and uncertainty. So I guess it’s a good thing, after all, that I was never anyone’s first kiss. Or first anything. I’ve lived my life way behind the curve. And that, my friends, has made all the difference.

Jong-Fast: I think it would have been cute to have been my husband's first kiss but when he was 13. I was a negative one, so I don't think it would have been such a great idea.

Robinson: Cate Blanchett. On a quiet little cobblestone street in Melbourne. She’s sixteen, I’m fourteen. A cab is idling at the curb, ready to take me to the airport. “You’re going to be a star,” I’d say, and then I’d plant one on her.

Stace: I think this is an almost unanswerable question, unless you remember someone you never got to kiss, prior to your first case. In that case, the answer is Juliette Gaffney, who seemed nice when we were both nine. Otherwise, if you're looking for a hindsight kiss with someone you met later, you have to visualize them at 13 or 14, which is weird, unless you want them unkissed at 18 or 21, which seems unnecessarily repressive. At the time of my first kiss, the answer was almost certainly Rebecca, whose first kiss it wasn't. Now, the answer would be my wife, Abbey - but in fact I'm quite happy with the way things turned out, and I'm glad that we didn't meet any earlier. So, on a wing: Carole Lombard, the most beautiful woman in black and white. It needn't have been her first kiss, however: could have been the last, or any number in the middle.

Jaime Clarke is the author of the novel WE’RE SO FAMOUS, editor of DON’T YOU FORGET ABOUT ME: CONTEMPORARY WRITERS ON THE FILMS OF JOHN HUGHES, and co-founder of POST ROAD, a national literary magazine based out of New York and Boston.