When poet Ann Batchelor Hursey was assigned the task of writing a critical response to Virginia Woolf’s The Death of a Moth and Other Essays, she wrote a letter to Woolf instead.

It was the only response she could imagine. In it, she mimicked Woolf’s cadences and asides and referred to her essay “The Humane Art.”

Batchelor Hursey will read her work tonight at 7 p.m. at Beacon Bards in Seattle.