With the boys back in school and Tom back to work, I am trying to learn how to be a writer again, which for the moment involves reschooling myself in how to gracefully manage lack of production. Considering that my essay "On Not Writing" is forthcoming in this winter's Sewanee Review, you'd think I'd have plenty to say now about the graceful management of creative struggle. But no. Every reschooling is a brand-new schooling, and I never get any better at the balance between worrying and not worrying. Merely I get better at recognizing the pattern.

In any case, among puttering over half a sentence clause (try these words; delete them; try these other words; delete them; try a different metrical opening; choke up in horror; delete it; reinsert the original words; delete them. . . . ) and writing a grant application and reading Nabokov and washing soccer socks and dragging brush into the woods and prodding the sauerkraut and frying pork chops and copying out poems and wondering if I have time to clean the barn and editing someone else's poetry collection and buying chicken grain and driving to piano lessons and organizing the eighth-grade dance and making four loaves of bread every other day (I wish I could tell you I was exaggerating about this), I find graceful management of anything difficult to imagine. I feel like I move through my days like a bumblebee moves through a garden: bump, bump, buzz, bumble, bumble, bump.

I am writing. But the process is so unprocessional.