Last night a dozen writers squeezed into my postcard house, chattered and ate pizza and amazed the cat, and then we all trooped down to Back Cove Books like a school field-trip outing, and there we wrote and talked with the twenty or thirty people who showed up. It was a great crowd, larger than we'd imagined: we were prepared just to be sitting around and writing with ourselves, so it felt wonderful to have such a turnout.

Everyone was kind of giddy--because this was our first public outing as a group, because we were excited by the audience response, but also because two of our number had just been announced that morning as finalists for this year's Maine Literary Award in Poetry: Maureen Thorson, who writes wonderful, hilarious, strange, elastic poems, often using them as a sort of still-life study of an object or a situation; and me, for Accidental Hymn. There are three finalists for the prize, and we were two of them: the oddity of that added to the group giddiness, I think.

Also, there's got some family giddiness: yes, I got named as finalist for the state's lit award, but also a mysterious stranger bought one of Tom's trash photos in his current show at Cove Street Arts, which is equally thrilling and more practically useful. So we're ending this work week on a bang.

Today, thank goodness, I have no gopher holes to pop through. I'll undergo my exercise slog, and probably check over my plans for tomorrow's epistolary workshop, but mostly I intend to write, read, and garden. Already the sun is coming out; it will be a beautiful day, and I did all of the housework and grocery shopping yesterday; I've paid my weekly dues to the employment gods, and today will be mine, and I cannot wait.