For the moment it's 1 degree above zero, but later today temps will rise and the freezing rain will begin and by the end of the week our lovely feet of snow will have become a sloppy mire and/or a Zamboni trail. The next few days look hard to love, weather-wise.

So I guess I'd best do the grocery shopping this morning. In the afternoon I'll be working with my high school poet, and in between times I'll fiddle with a poem revision and finish up the housework. I brought my long "Clytemnestra" draft to my poetry group last night, and Betsy suggested a few slight changes that I'm excited to try out. I ought not to put off those experiments because my writing time is already evaporating into teaching and prep and editing and manuscript consulting. A group of local poets wants to take part in a month-long grind--writing and sharing a poem a day--but I'm running far away from that. I've never liked the idea of writing as chore, but the real thing I can't take is an inbox crammed full of poem drafts. Maybe I'd feel differently if my day job didn't already require me to read and comment on other people's poems, but the image of that inbox is giving me hives. I can only do so much.

Yesterday I started sussing out a new class I'll be teaching for the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance in August. It will be a two-session generative workshop, in person and probably outdoors, unless Covid forces us onto Zoom. The title, tentatively, is "Sheltering in Place: Writing Poems from Where You Are." My idea is to address how the pandemic has damaged and disrupted our attempts—in some cases even our ability—to write and read productively. I hope to use these sessions to focus on helping people regain some purchase in their writing lives. With inspiration from several contemporary Maine-based poets, we’ll read and talk about poetry drafts as present-tense enactments, focusing on ways to write from where and how we are, not from how we expect ourselves to be. The sessions will be open to anyone, at any level of experience, and will include conversation, prompts, and generous writing time. I'm not sure when registration will open, but I'll let you know.