The temperature is in the mid-20s this morning, forecast to rise into the 40s, but today and tomorrow are the last hurrah of moderation for a while. By next weekend we're supposed to be well below zero, and even midweek, when I'm heading north to Monson, highs won't get out of the 20s.

For some reason I woke up early this morning. But the coffee is good, and now I'm cuddled into my couch corner, tapping out this note to you and pondering the various chores I need to finish before I buckle down for my afternoon class.

I think it will be a good few hours: this group of six poets was my very first chapbook-class cohort, and since then they've asked to reconvene regularly for check-in sessions. So I've worked out a series of afternoon classes on a variety of manuscript-related topics, and this one, as I think I've told you, will swirl around notions of wildness: where do we embrace ecstasy in our manuscripts? where do we settle for tameness or timidity? how can we identify our self-silencing?

I sit here in my distinctly un-wild little house, pondering the conundrum of ecstasy. My daily life is tidy and routine. I drive myself forward into my work, like a good Puritan should. All this exterior neatness, so that I can make space for the magma hissing and bubbling at my core.

I was thinking, yesterday, about how relieved I am I never became a full-time English teacher and had to pretend I care about comma splices and run-on sentences and the three-part essay. Of course, as a manuscript editor, I have to know about that stuff, and I have to implement it too. But I don't want to have to grade kids on it; I don't want to have to pretend to anyone else that I believe in the Holy Grail of Correct Grammar. It's just another random educational canned good, like how to discern the three categories of ancient Greek columns or read Roman numerals or rattle off the names of the American presidents.

The point is: what's in your heart? and why isn't it on your page?