So this is what I've been thinking, and I'd like to hear your response to it: I'm mulling over ways to tour the history of my writing trajectory . . . how one piece has led to the next, led to the next; how my concerns have cycled back to the beginning in surprising (to me) ways or branched out unexpectedly into places I had no intention of going. I'm not interested in reverting to juvenilia--which one of last year's visiting poets, Leslea Newman, did so beautifully--but I am imagining a way to move from the concerns of Boy Land, into Tracing Paradise and How the Crimes Happened (which I worked on and published concurrently), into the essays of The Vagabond's Bookshelf and the poems of Same Old Story (both of which are finished but still in manuscript), into a few of the prose musings on this blog (which is publishing its own version of some kind of tale), into the new poems I'm accruing in my historical fiction project (which appears to be turning back to at least one of the themes of Boy Land).
If you have thoughts or responses, I'd be happy to hear them. Meanwhile, I've got to go outside and argue with some blackflies.
4 comments:
YES I'd like to hear that journey
Well, we'll see how it works out, Ruth. Great to know you'll be there!
I have a black fly bite on my neck that looks like a hickey. As for your reading...I wish I were going to be there to hear it! Leslea referred to specific years (if I'm remembering correctly). That worked as a chronology as far as being able to follow it easily by ear. Are there one or two themes that seem to be developing in your work, and that you revisit differently (or similarly) in a progression? Are there certain challenges or motivations that seem to bring your writing to the page in a progression of sorts?
I was there for Leslea's reading and I did the chronology; however following a thematic progression would be wonderful...."just saying".
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