Though the temperature was above freezing and there was visible melting, yesterday was one of those days when I couldn't get warm. Raw, my mother calls such days. Still, I made myself go for a brisk walk, head down into the wind, and I admired the tough little snowdrops peeking out of the ice crust, and I scraped the snow off my cold frame and encouraged it to imagine spring.

I feel as if I'm writing the same post day after day--desk work desk work desk work--but that's always the story of a giant editing job. I can't really write to you about the actual details of the work because it involves someone else's not-yet-published manuscript, so all I can do is [insert generalized work talk here] and leave you with the hazy sense that [Dawn is busy].

I've been copyediting for more than 30 years now. It has given me a paycheck through my years of distraction--homesteading, child rearing, the pandemic--and in many ways has been the frame that has allowed me to cultivate a personal writing life. I've learned a number of things from copyediting: close attention to syntax and sentence movement, the importance of visual accuracy (e.g., capitalization and punctuation), and how visual accuracy may translate into sonic accuracy (via punctuation and other sorts of pause). Being a copyeditor is kind of like playing scales and etudes: without personal commitment, I work my way through the minutiae of the language; I find patterns and disruptions; I make quick decisions about clarity and repetition. All of this has served as a training ground for my own poetry and prose.

And yet.

After 30-some years on the job, I've outstripped myself. I'm no longer an apprentice writer, and copyediting is always the same job: fix up the sentences. The scales and etudes comparison no longer feels particularly useful, and the job swells into my writing and teaching time. But I still don't earn enough to quit it, and so I don't. And there are things I like about it: the surprise of a fascinating book, conversations with the press staff or an intriguing author. 

And yet.

Well, we all have these kinds of obligations, and at least I can do this one in slippers and an old sweater. As commercial word-work goes, it's way better for me than promotional brochures and ad copy would have been. I primarily work on academic manuscripts so I always learn something I didn't know before. And poets always have to have a real job. Things could be worse: I could be like Sir Walter Ralegh and have to work as a free-lance mercenary and colonizing treasure hunter. That would really suck.