We spent yesterday in Harpswell, hiking along the watery finger known as Long Reach--a fine New England monicker, rough, plain, metaphorical, and exact. It was an outdoorsy weekend, and will meld into an outdoorsy week as I prep for my two nights spent camping with high school writers. The weather will be hot, and the writing activities will involve a couple of ideas I adapted from presentations at this year's Frost Place conference (letter writing, landscape terminology) combined with dictation (from a book about the Inuit whale hunt), choral reading (Lucille Clifton's "blessing the boats"), and numerous interrelated writing prompts. Wish me luck; I'm excited to see how it all works out.

Today Vox Populi is featuring my poem "Epithalamion for Grendel"--a love poem for a monster and his homeland, and the first decent pantoum I've ever written. It's a suitable poem for the opening day of an environmental writing seminar.