Thirteen degrees this morning, with a quilt of snow resting quietly over the dark neighborhood. Winter in Maine: I'm glad it's finally decided to stick around.

The house is warm, the coffee is hot, the cat is restless. Today I need to practice the violin, clean bathrooms, work on class plans; maybe finish an editing project; take a walk in the cold; probably go out tonight to write. I'm still waiting for the next big editing project to arrive--supposedly that will happen by tomorrow. Till then I continue to fidget among my small doings.

I've been experimenting with a series of poems that borrow titles from famous works of literature but do not retell those stories. And I've been rediscovering the glories of Austen's Mansfield Park. I know I've written extensively about this book before, but I'm always finding new beauties. For instance:

Too soon did [Fanny] find herself at the drawing-room door, and after pausing a moment for what she knew would not come, for a courage which the outside of no door had ever supplied her, she turned the lock in desperation, and the lights of the drawing-room and all the collected family were before her.

Can there be a more exquisite description of this particular sort of teenage anxiety, of the physical melodrama of nervousness, "turn[ing] the lock in desperation," and that magnificent phrase "for a courage which the outside of no door had ever supplied her"--the hopelessness of her hopes . . . and all of this just to show a girl in the moment before she turns a door handle and enters a room.

It is never a waste of time to reread a Jane Austen novel. Never. Every time I do, I feel like I'm learning just a little bit more about  human nature, about what doesn't matter in a story and what does, about the precision of description.

Reread, people! Reread! This is my bossy advice for the day! Do not pride yourself on rarely going back to a book. If you're a writer, you must study your art. You don't do that by following the advice of craft books. You do it by rereading and rereading and rereading the books that have done what you long to do. For me, Austen and Dickens and George Eliot and Hayden Carruth and James Baldwin and all of their kind are more than favorite authors. They are the bibles I pore over. How do they do it? How do they do it? I read and reread, and each time a little more light comes into my life. I'll never be as great as they are, but I keep trying to learn.