Yesterday morning, as I was shuffling through poems, trying to prep for next week's reading, I heard my phone tick Email. When I checked the message, I discovered it was an announcement that I'd made the first cut for a very big prize. This prize is so big that I have absolutely no expectation of winning. This prize is the sort that cements a career. As a result, having made any sort of cut in the competition feels like fireworks, and I am chuffed and cheerful and disbelieving. I keep rereading the email to see if there's been some mistake.

So today, in the midst of packing, I need to mail a stack of my books to the foundation and write notes to recommenders and otherwise act as if I believe in myself. Though it's not as if I don't believe in myself. I do: just not in this context. This context is a fairy tale.

Still, a fairy tale makes any Friday morning more exciting, and so I am sitting here in my couch corner bubbling quietly to myself before I return to earth and start hauling compost and recycling to the curb and tossing towels into the washer and scrubbing breakfast dishes and otherwise enacting my accustomed role. 

Last night I went out to my friend Betsy's book launch at Mechanics' Hall, a beautiful old building downtown, built in the early 1800s as an artisans' improvement association. The place was packed: probably 100 people were there to cheer her on, including lots of friends, who waved at me and hugged me and tapped me on the shoulder and saved me a seat and chattered to me, and I said to myself, Gosh, I seem to live here now. I recall the first big public poetry event I attended in Portland, where I was so overwhelmed by shyness that I left early without talking to anyone. I felt like a disaster. And now I do not feel like a disaster. That is a welcome change.