The most surprising thing has happened to me. I have started writing a short story.

I have not written a story for 25 years. An oddly enough, Salamander, the magazine that accepted that last story, lo these many years ago, just accepted one of my western Pennsylvania poems this week. This is mere coincidence, but still it adds to the peculiarity of the moment.

Here's what happened: I was grinding away at a chapter about an Amy Lowell poem, and suddenly a line leaped into my head: "Where she lived there wasn't much choice when it came to finding a second husband." Clearly (to my ear, anyway) this line is not poetry. But it was something; it was a trigger; it made me wonder where she lived and why she wanted a second husband and what might have happened to the first. And now I am almost four pages in and just beginning to discover what's going on with this character.

We'll see if I ever manage to finish it. I am trying not to doubt my stamina, but I do doubt it. In the past I have written some truly horrible short stories.