Yesterday, as I was chunking through my editing hours, I got a phone call from a friend who runs a large annual poetry festival in the state. Generally the day hours of the festival feature local poets as panelists, workshops leaders, etc. Then a big-name national poet reads at night. But given that 2020 is Maine's bicentennial, she had the idea to keep the focus entirely here: on our history of poetry, our current state of letters, our hopes for the future, that kind of thing. So instead of a big gun at night, Baron Wormser, Betsy Sholl, and I will read and speak about our own histories together as well as the history of poetry more generally.

Both Baron and Betsy are former state poet laureates; I am the baby of the group (a comic note, don't you think?)--a former student of Baron's, a long-admirer of Betsy. It will be, of course, intensely sweet to share a stage with these two friends, and I hope my perspective of them, as an apprentice to their art, will be a way to celebrate everything they've done for Maine poetry. But I also feel tremulous--as if I'm trying to climb stairs while wearing someone else's unbuckled galoshes. It's a manifestation of the "who am I anyway?" question, the one that jabs me in the kidneys every time I start to get above myself. Ye olde Puritan shiv.

Enough of these maunderings: let's talk about weather. It's 14 degrees here this morning. Stoops and roofs and cars and grass are coated with a sugar-crust of snow, but the house is warm and bright. I do like winter, once I get used to the idea.