The temperature in Monson hovers at zero this morning, and it won't get a lot warmer than that today. The town, which is so cheerful and "stop here!" in the summertime, now hunkers under a blanket of dingy snow. It looks like the set of a sad film about aging on-the-lam bank robbers holed up in a village at the end of the world.

But my apartment is warm, and last night I got into bed at 7 and stayed there till 5:30 this morning. I don't often sleep so hard when I'm away from home, but my body was apparently in need.

Today I'll be beginning the first of three sessions on revision. This always feels like a giant shift, after months of focus on pulling new work out of thin air. But the kids are ready. They love to write; it's incredible--heartrending, really--how much they love it. And revision, at this stage, is really just a chance to look hard at what they've already made and then re-imagine it as something else. We've played lots of "reimagine this as . . . " games all year (my big teaching discovery with this cohort has been the power of comedy in teaching craft skills), so I think the writers will slide easily into a more serious concentration on their work. At least that is my hope, and maybe the experiment will work, or maybe it won't, but something will happen to help me figure out what's next.

Snow kept falling yesterday, giving us maybe another 5 inches of accumulation . . . I'm peering through the window trying to guess, but it's hard to tell in the dark. T's pickup is still in the shop, but he is up early, rushing through his breakfast, getting himself ready to borrow my car and put in a few hours of work before returning it to me so I can drive up to Monson this afternoon.

Sweetly he did all of yesterday's shoveling while I chewed away at my current editing project, but I expect I'll be out there this morning, cleaning up the new stuff. We did go for a trudge, late in the day, and the neighborhood roads were still pretty messy and challenging to navigate. It was a big storm. Even Maine had to take a deep breath and sit down for a little while.

I'll head straight to Monson this afternoon instead of stopping overnight with friends, which means I'll have an evening to myself in a campus apartment. I always struggle with these empty overnights: never quite able to work, never quite able to rest. Maybe this time I'll figure out some way to fill the hours usefully. Or maybe it will be another night of drinking tea and wandering from window to window, staring out into the snow-dark. Sleep and I have not been good friends lately.

For now the snow has paused . . . maybe we'll get a few more inches today, but certainly we have plenty to work with for now. My phone claims that 20 inches have fallen in Portland, but the total doesn't seem that high in my neighborhood, at least from my indoor vantage point. Still, whatever the details, the world looks exactly like Maine.

Tom will be home today, but I have to work, and I have a meeting in the afternoon, and I'll need to make bread at some point, and of course the two of us will be shoveling. I suspect the Good Samaritan neighborhood snowblower owners will be on duty, which will be a big help, but we've nonetheless got a lot of labor ahead of us.

I hustled through my grocery shopping and weekly housework chores yesterday morning so I wouldn't have to cram them in around shoveling and work today. I meant to spend the afternoon reading The Pillow Book and Tabucchi's Dream of Dreams and maybe wrestling with poem drafts, but all I did was lounge with a Le Carre novel, idly check football scores on my phone, and watch the snow fall. A fire crackled in the stove. Young Chuck flopped belly-up on the hearthrug. My beloved wandered upstairs and down.

But I didn't sleep well last night--maybe because of snow excitement, maybe because of American terror; who knows? Now I sit here alone in the shadowy living room, nursing my second tiny cup of coffee, listening to the far-off scrape of a city snowplow. The sound is soothing. I have always loved snowplow guys . . . All night long they rumble up and down the roads and lanes and highways, clearing, clearing, clearing. Snow swirls into their headlights, eddies against their windshield, yet on and on they go. Cloaked in the loneliness of 3 a.m. Muscling forward into the void. 

Two degrees below zero this morning, and the city waits for snow. It's forecast to start here mid-afternoon and will accumulate fast--maybe 18 inches by the time it winds down on Monday.

Tom's busted pickup got towed while I was teaching yesterday. The mechanics won't be able to look at it till Tuesday; so while technically he could drive my car to work tomorrow, he's already told the company he won't be traveling in the storm. So that is one item removed from my box of worries.

I think yesterday's class went well. Visual experimentation is challenging, and I know some participants struggled with it . . . I struggled with it myself, but also I get excited when I don't wholly understand what I'm doing or reading, and not everyone feels the same. In any case, It was good to see so many friends from Monson and the Frost Place, good to tag-team with my dear Teresa, good to play with mysterious materials.

And then hard to discover that while we'd been so absorbed in our work, the gestapo was executing yet another witness.

It's one degree above zero this morning in the little northern city by the sea--balmy compared to much of the rest of northern New England. Thank goodness for brand-new furnaces . . . though of course the curse of household disasters refuses to relinquish its grip. Last night, as we were driving back from dinner with friends, the clutch in Tom's truck suddenly gave out. Fortunately we were close enough to home so that he could more or less coast into the driveway. But while I'm teaching today, he's going to be figuring out where he can get his truck towed to on a Saturday morning and what the hell we're going to do about vehicles next week, given the giant snowstorm coming in tomorrow and Monday and the fact that I have to drive back and forth to Monson on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Yesterday afternoon a friend took me to see Hamnet. I did not love the novel--I felt, there, as if the character of Shakespeare was somehow too thin, compared to Agnes's. But the movie was far more convincing, in large part because Jessie Buckley, the actor who plays Agnes, has the most incredible of faces. The emotions she conveys through her expressions constantly also reveal the motivations and inner lives of those around her. It's really remarkable. Yes, the film is a shameless tear-jerker, and I cried much of the way through, but it also is incisive about how people misunderstand one another's grief and how an artist channels sorrow. I wasn't sure I wanted to see it, but I'm glad I changed my mind.

Otherwise, the atmosphere in southern Maine continues to be grim. We're under siege--by ICE, by cold. I'll spend today in class, curled up in my blue chair in my tiny sweet study, as thugs terrorize my neighbors and freezing mist coils over the bay.

Today will be my sort-of day off, as I'll be zoom-teaching tomorrow. By sort-of day off I mean I won't be editing all day (though probably I'll put in a few hours) but will instead be prepping for tomorrow's class and trying to catch up on house obligations . . . all of which, you'll note, counts as work so I don't actually know why I'm pretending that today will be a holiday of any kind. But I will be off my usual weekday schedule, and I will have some breathing room around the edges, and I have been trained by society to denigrate my seven-days-a-week household labor, so no doubt all that feeds into my pretense.

Tomorrow Teresa and I will be leading a class for Monson and Frost Place alums that focuses on using visual prompts to generate new poem drafts. In a few ways it will be a sneak peak into our plans for this summer's poetry conference, which will center around notions of transformation. We've got a sizable group signed up, and temperatures in northern New England are supposed to drop below zero, so it should be a good day to curl up in a chair and talk and write.

I know I need to design and schedule another open Poetry Kitchen session for the spring, but I haven't had the headspace to create yet one more new thing. I've been working on a sonnet project with Teresa and Jeannie, working on a performance project with Teresa, Gretchen, and Gwynnie, writing new curriculum for the summer conference, tweaking my class plans for the high schoolers, plus reading stacks of books, both alone and in tandem. I've got plenty of poems I could start sorting through for a next collection, but I haven't made any headway there at all--I can't seem to find adequate open brain and body space. I guess this is why people go to artist residencies, but such luxuries are not in my future.

Well, everything will shake itself out in time, in some way or other. Either I'll put together a new collection or I won't. It's not the end of the world if I never publish another book.

 

This is the prettiest meal I've cooked so far in 2026: sautéed Micmac brook trout with lime and rosemary, pappardelle with garlic and Aleppo pepper flakes, butter lettuce with a simple balsamic dressing, and sliced blood oranges. The photo is a reassuring contrast to the terrible chapatis I made yesterday, which refused to puff and ended up in the compost bin (although the chicken curry they were supposed to accompany was tasty). I've been the primary household cook since I was a teenager, but one is never too old for spectacular kitchen failure.

Portland got yet another dusting of snow overnight, and we have an odd brief warmup forecast for this afternoon before temperatures dive below zero for the weekend. I should go out for a walk before the Arctic moves in; but with ICE terrorizing our town, yesterday's was nerve-wracking. Every time I caught sight of an SUV at an odd angle or a van idling along the street, my heart sank. At the grocery store I suspected all burly self-satisfied-looking white guys of harboring cruel intent. I longed to reach a hand out to my cheerful Latinx checkout boy and say, "Be careful," but what kid wants to be embarrassed by an unknown aging shopper in a loud hat?

Well, I will go out again, and I will keep my phone at the ready, and if I had a whistle I would use it. I hate this thuggery with all my heart.