I accomplished a lot, writer-wise, yesterday. I finished (I think) the poem about my visitor, and I wrote the opening page of my review of Baron's novel, and I spent a fair amount of time with the poems of Blake and Thomas Wyatt, and I read a chunk of Hilary Mantel's The Mirror and the Light (which is just as good as the previous books in the trilogy). Altogether, I'm starting to feel more like myself again.

And I'm surprised, and pleased, to report that my October online writing retreat is completely full. I don't yet have access to the class list, so I don't know who's on it (unless they've told me directly). But if you meant to sign up and didn't, please send me an email so that I can create a waiting list, or possibly suggest to the organizer that we schedule a second session.

Today I'll mostly be doing yard and garden chores, but maybe I'll get a chance to work on the book review too. I can't explain how good it feels to be actively writing again. I mean: it always feels good to come back to the work after a drought, but somehow, in this dreadful historical moment, retrieving my powers feels especially rich.

Here's a passage from The Mirror and the Light that I love and wish I'd written. The main character, Thomas Cromwell, is half-asleep and dreaming of his home--

Now Austin Friars begins to shape like the house of a great man, its front lit by oriel windows, its small town garden expanding into orchards. He has bought up the parcels of land that adjoin it, some from the friars and some from the Italian merchants who are his friends and live in this quarter. He owns the neighborhood, and in his chests . . . he keeps the deeds that have divided, valued and named it. Here are his freedoms and titles, the ancient seals and signatures of the dead, witnessed by city wardens and sergeants, by aldermen and sheriffs whose chains of office are melted for coin, whose corpses rest under stone. Citizen tailors, citizen skinners have plied their trades here, Broad Street and Swan Alley and London Wall. Two sisters have inherited a garden; before their husbands sell it to the friars, they stroll under the fruit trees together, skins fresh in the apple-scented evenings, fingers of Isabella resting on Margaret's arm: through the braided pattern of branches they look into the sky, and their feet in pattens leave bruises on the grass. . . . History inks the skin: it writes on the hide of sheep long slaughtered, or calves who never breathed; the dead cut away the ground beneath us, so that when he descends a stair at Austin Friars, the tread falls away under his foot, and below him there is another stair, no longer visible except in the mind's eye; and down it goes, to the city where the legions of Rome left their ashes beneath the earth, their glass in the soil, their bones in the river. And down it plunges and down, into the subsoil of himself, through France and Italy and the pays bas, through the lowlands and the quicksands, by the marshes and meadows estuarine, through the floodplains of his dreams to where he wakes, shocked into a new day: the clang of the anvil from the smithy shakes the sunlight in a room where, a helpless child, he lies swaddled, startled from sleep, feeling as if for the first time the beat of his own heart.