I'm starting to get ready for the Frost Place Teaching Conference, which will be organized somewhat differently from the way it's been arranged in the past. Instead of three visiting writers, we'll have only two; and Baron and I will reascend the platform on Wednesday and spend the session focusing specifically on writing and revision in the classroom. This change has one other implication: previously Baron and I had split the first night's reading, but this year I read alone on June 26. The change means that I have an extraordinary 45 minutes or so to stand at the front of Robert Frost's barn, before an excited and affectionate audience, and do whatever in the world I want to do. Given that most readings are 10-20 minutes long in front of who-knows-what sort of distracted people, a reading like this is a unique opportunity to try something different.

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.