34 degrees yesterday, 24 this morning: no wonder I detected a hint of winter in yesterday's wind.

I spent my dream night wandering through hotel rooms and airports with the cat, who was sometimes in his carrier but sometimes slithering through heating vents, etc. Also I had to do a lot of dream vacuuming in these places. I was relieved to wake up at home.

Today's schedule will be kind of like yesterday's, lots of editing but with less bread baking and more pot-roast braising. I began transferring some of the weekend's poem drafts out of my notebook and onto the laptop, and it turns out that I'm going to be very happy with the most horrible of them all--a dreadful little piece about catching mice in traps as an exercise in unbridled power. The prompt was a fast-write, assigned after reading a passage in which Odysseus shares his plans for restocking his farms (basically, "steal sheep from other people"). All I told the writers was "Go on a raid." It was our final prompt, and everyone in the class wrote very startling pieces, including me.

But there's something cathartic in reaching down into the marrow of human violence. After spending so much of this past year with the Odyssey and the Iliad, I can't help but begin to recognize those archetypal traits within myself too, though they're thickly swaddled in niceness and self-control. But when I allow myself to exist within violence on the page, I do learn some stuff.

I've done so much new writing in the past week, between the class and the evening salon. It's exciting. I feel as if I've been writing well for the past couple of years, but my writing time has been so controlled and limited, just because of the circumstances of my living situation and my work obligations. I had to wait to turn on the faucet, though when I did, the work splashed out. Both the weekend and the salon have been dedicated to flushing out the plumbing, and now the sink is filling up with all kinds of floating debris. I am delighted.