––What could ever convince you otherwise?

Ebershoff: Nothing, I hope. Or let me amend that: I’ve always thought of reading to be as magical and wondrous as time travel. I can open The Odyssey and find myself instantly bobbing on the ancient, wine-dark sea. So I guess I should say until we can time-travel, I don’t believe the book––or whatever we will call it in the next centuries––will disappear.

Hay: Well I am convinced the dead persist, just not in the way that is regularly depicted. The myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, for example, illustrates the power of the dead over the living. The memory of someone lost is often behind imaginative and creative acts. Loss can be an opening. The dead stand in for what little knowledge we can have about time. There is a sense of liberation to be had from the experience of loss; a reminder of the limit we will all come to. The dead do send the living messages – by their silence. They silently indicate that we must find freedom within the confinement of time. They tell us without speaking that the past is gone, even while they signal its value. They tell us not to be afraid of losing and they do all this while they have ceased to exist. The question is, why isn’t that extraordinary and supernatural enough?

MacKinnon: Every day I’m convinced I’m wrong. Every single day I want to be proven horribly mistaken. Sometimes it happens. In terms of soul mates, there are my children, I’m convinced we were destined to be together. Politicians? I’m still skeptical. A sign from above? Well, there is this: My husband and I were shopping when I told him of this novel I had just started, how the protagonist’s name eluded me for weeks. As we walked into an antique shop, I told him that her name finally came to me: Clara Marsh. After browsing a few minutes, I spotted an old envelope leaning against a candlestick, a one-cent stamp in the upper hand corner. When I picked it up, I knew there was something more at work here, more than I was privy to. The envelope was addressed to Clara Marsh. It had to be a sign.

Menger-Anderson: If my local Safeway or Whole Foods conducted a study comparing the incidence of things like harmful E.coli and salmonella among shoppers who use sanitary wipes on their carts and those that do not, I would consider the evidence and perhaps shift my strong and admittedly poorly informed position on this issue. Without access to such data, however, I am happy to assume that the results would show no statistically significant hand-wipe advantage (and I suspect that even if I saw hard evidence, I'd be reluctant to change my ways). Feel free to bring up my pig-headedness the next time I call in sick.

Robinson: If I saw the green flash, or the Tooth Fairy, then I'd be convinced. I'm hoping it will happen, actually, because I believe in the fantastical as a part of our lives. Look at Aurora Borealis: I believe in that. But do you want to know something? The thing is that I'm disappointed that I've never seen it. This is not a purely objective, scientific response, I know that. I'm kind of hurt, if you want to know. Because why not me? I'd be so good at watching it. I'd be riveted. I'd watch the whole thing––the sudden pale-green glow, the gradual––or swift, who knows?––fluid arrival of that wild unexpected color into the rich roseate landscape of sunset. I'd watch green flow magically into the sky, turning it into a sunset we've never dreamed of. I'd love it, I'd be spellbound. And I'd be such a proselytizer. I'd tell everyone it existed. Everyone. And I'd tell everyone to put their teeth under their pillows.

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.