This week was already shaping up to be a sloppy mess, work- and travel-wise, and now yet another giant wet snowstorm is primed to slam Portland tonight and tomorrow, just when I'm supposed to be driving north to teach. It's quite aggravating.

Well, grousing will do no good, so I will attempt to stop. On the bright side the weather looks like it will behave itself for my trip to Chicago on Friday. And if I have to zoom-teach again on Wednesday, oh well. In the meantime I'll be back to editing, exercise class, laundry, and other such obligations. I bought a pretty blue sweater on sale over the weekend. I got a ton of reading done and prepped for my class, in whatever form it will take. T and I went for a walk, and I planted arugula in the cold frame, and I saw crocuses in other people's front yards, and I enjoyed the long daylight evening. Spring is almost here, no matter what these stupid snowstorms think.

I'm very much enjoying the Saunders book on Russian short-story models. Though his focus is prose, what he's saying feels pertinent to poems as well, and I like how he avoids jargon such as plot and rising action and such and sticks closely to the writer-reader connection:

We might think of a story this way: the reader is sitting in the sidecar of a motorcycle the writer is driving.  In a well-told story, reader and writer are so close together that they're one unit. My job as the writer is to keep the distance between motorcycle and sidecar small, so that when I go right, you go right. When I, at the end of the story, take the motorcycle off the cliff, you have no choice but to follow. (I haven't, so far, given you any reason to distance yourself from me.) If the space between motorcycle and sidecar gets too great, when I corner, you fail to hear about it, and fall out of relationship with me and get bored or irritated and stop reading and go off to watch a movie.