I've been working on a pair of poems that arose from memories of growing up around Quakers. My parents began attending Friends' Meeting when I was in late elementary school and remained involved with it for many years. Both my sister and I were married in Meeting, so it was certainly an important influence on us . . . though not necessarily religiously. It's been interesting to plumb that relationship, and it's also been interesting to fictionalize those memories and speculations. This summer's poems have involved a great deal of fictionalizing: very few are straight-up memoir. I chalk some of that up to Vievee Francis's "pick four words at random" trigger. That small twist has helped me find new ways to treat old stories.

Three of this summer's new poems have already been picked up for publication. That, along with the forward progress of Chestnut Ridge, makes me feel as if my poetry life is solidifying a bit, after two years of glop and ooze. I've committed to joining a local writing group, and later this month I'm going on a camping/writing retreat with a mixed group of known and unknown poets, where I've been tasked with being the workshop facilitator. So I'm attempting to step forward into some sort of regular poetic interchange--a brand-new situation for me, but maybe it's time.