It's Friday, and that means drag-trash-to-the-curb day, and wash-sheets-and-towels day, and clean-the-downstairs-rooms day, and in the interstices of all of this: exercise and editing and class planning and talking to Teresa about Donne. I guess I'll manage to juggle everything, though I have no idea what we'll be eating for dinner. Something must be left to chance.

I finished Jiles's News of the World, and now I'm reading a V. S. Pritchett story collection, The Careless Widow. I hope I start writing well again, and soon, but in the meantime I'll just keep reading and reading and scribbling down blurts and hammering out these letters to you, and then maybe eventually my easy swing will return and the fates will take me out of the batting cage and put me back into the lineup.

I am almost 59 years old, and only in the past decade have I clearly recognized how vital it is to be obstinate--dogged, even mulish--about my vocation. I love those animal terms: they reinforce how unromantic art making can be; how much it depends on just crouching in front of the the chipmunk hole until the chipmunk finally slips out. And then? The claws and the teeth.

This letter has too many metaphors. But so be it. I'm trying to try to not put myself on trial. I'm writing into the black hole of not writing. It's hard to describe this sensation without metaphor. Maybe that's because the words themselves are struggling. I don't know. But I keep at them anyway.