I had a lovely sleep-in this morning, punctuated by a dream about my sister and a parade and a pesty baby bear and a turret full of chickens. (No chickens were murdered by bears in this dream; they merely flapped and squawked.)

Today, Saturday, hurray! I know we're supposed to get a skim of snow this evening, but I nonetheless plan to treat today as a gardening day. Yesterday I did a bunch of raking; today I'll finish that chore and start prepping garden beds for planting and setting up my new pea trellis. The snow will be insignificant, if it's even snow at all. I am feeling very confident in spring.

Yesterday was such a busy day . . . editing, of course, but also a phone meeting about an upcoming event, and I started outlining two different April classes, and I wrote a page of an amorphous essay about how time is addressed both within individual poems and over the arc of a poet's career. I am very, very pressed, work-wise. I know I'll have to work this weekend too--prepping for a video session, catching up on Donne, probably doing more class designing--but the garden is my number-one priority today. I need to get my hands into that dirt.

I do have some news to share with you. Maine's current poet laureate, Julia Bouwsma, is launching, along with the Maine Arts Commission and the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance, an endeavor called WriteME--a statewide project focusing on sharing epistolary poems: that is, poems that feel like personal letters. The idea is that people around Maine, poets and non-poets, will be matched to write to one another . . . sort of like poetic penpals.

To kick off the project, the administrators will be offering a series of free workshops in which interested people will learn more about what epistolary poems are and get a chance to write a few themselves. These workshops are open to anyone: you do not have to live in Maine. Anyone also includes teenagers, so if you have students, by all means encourage them to participate.

There will be five hour-and-a-half workshops offered in April: three live, and two on zoom. Richard Blanco and I will be teaching the zoom classes. Valerie Lawson, Maya Williams, and meg willing will be offering in-person workshops in various parts of the state. 

Remember: these are free and you don't need to know squat about writing poems. You just need to be excited and curious! I hope you can join us.