The cat bite is healing and I'm feeling much better. What a strange little interlude. But it's mostly over now, and I am back in the saddle. This morning I'll deal with house stuff, this afternoon I'll be teaching, this evening I'll be shamelessly comma-splicing and frying fish cakes and braising the season's first kale harvest.

The late summer flowers are in their (drought-saddened) glory. The living-room mantle overflows with cosmos and zinnias, chive flowers and bachelor's buttons. And I particularly love this variety of cosmos, fragile blooms over feathery foliage, each flower like crepe paper.

The Monson Arts team is getting ready to restart the high school program this fall, so I've been working on a small description of it, to share with partner schools. Just writing it made me excited: I wish, wish, wish I'd had this chance when I was fifteen. But that is the sweet thing about my job: I can invent the class I wish I'd been able to take.

The Monson Arts high school studio program offers a cohort of talented local students the opportunity to participate in an intense, school-year-long studio experience on the campus of Monson Arts. The program has two branches: one for visual art, led by Alan Bray; one for writing, led by Dawn Potter. Both instructors are full-time working artists who will guide students into closer knowledge of what it means to make art the center of a life: helping them hone their craft, build bonds with other young artists from around the region, and become more confident about their future as creative makers.

This is a studio experience, not an academic class. It is designed for students who are self-motivated, quirky, and curious, who may or may not be classically “good at school” but have the potential to thrive in a free-wheeling, focused, creative environment.