The boy is baking up a storm. Yesterday, he produced sesame-topped dinner rolls; today, he declares, he'll tackle herbed French bread. It's delightful to have him messing around at the stove . . . and also nostalgiac, as this is exactly how I learned to bake myself: as a way to while away long summer afternoons in my parents' kitchen.

Today I've got a student paper to read, and a batch of editing to tackle, and, if the garden ever dries out, mowing and weeding and harvesting and such. Tomorrow I'm on the road for my penultimate gig of the summer; Friday we've got tickets to see the Brazilian singer Seu Jorge; maybe we'll fit in a baseball game this weekend.

Lately, a friend has been writing to me about his experiences with my book The Conversation. He's been reading it but also doing the writing exercises, and his reactions have been so interesting to me. It's not often (by which I mean never) that I get this kind of follow-up to my writing and revision prompts, and it's helpful to discover that some little notion I had about comma experimentation or whatever turns out to be actually useful to someone. One never knows.

I hope to spend more time with Gjertrud Schnackenberg's poems. For some reason, a dose of formalism has been tonic, though at the moment I don't feel a particular urge to imitate it. Maybe it's the pacing that is drawing me--the way a metered line rolls out across the page.

Last week I dictated Richard Wilbur's beautiful rhymed lyric "The Barred Owl" to the high school kids at my environmental writing seminar. My prompt for the kids was to choose two words from Wilbur's poem and then use them to jumpstart their own drafts--but they could not use end rhymes. I wanted to make sure they weren't hamstringing themselves by focusing on rhyme at the expense of their full emotional engagement in the task at hand.

And like a miracle: that night, as we were in our tents, two barred owls settled in the trees over our heads and began a long duet: "'Who cooks for you?" and then 'Who cooks for you?'"