Yesterday morning started out warm and rainy, and I'm glad I went for a walk then because the weather got suddenly colder and very windy. Midday, I lit a fire in the stove, trying to battle the drafts and the dankness. And all night gusts buffeted the little house. I felt like a boat rocking in a lake.

But at least I slept well, which is more than I can say for the previous two nights. And now here I sit with my coffee, reacquainting myself with day.

This morning I'll finish up some editing and then send a batch of files to the author. I'll work on class planning and clean the upstairs rooms, and tonight I'll go out to write. I'm glad to report that I fought my way through the byzantine toils of the government's online grant portal and managed to submit my NEA fellowship application yesterday--one of my least favorite tasks ever, though at least it doesn't cost any money. But, yikes. What an absurd, overcomplicated, nonintuitive, antiquated process. I think it was invented by a committee of caterpillars.

Tom, I'm happy to say, is finally feeling better. And I'm still not sick, a little miracle in its own right. I suppose I ought to think about submitting poems somewhere, but at the moment I'm really only interested in writing them. I'm in the midst of a good conversation about revision and critique with my friend, the poet Stu Kestenbaum, who helped to found Monson Arts and led Haystack School of Crafts for many years. It seems that performing artists have long understand that the maker needs to be in control of conversations about change. So why have writers gravitated to the workshop model, where the maker cowers in the midst of spears, like a victim tied to a stake? It's a puzzle.

Yesterday's Monson high school class was particularly gratifying. We're in the midst of a big three-session revision project, and the kids have really stepped up. They are hard workers, with extreme focus. It is impressive, and this was an especially challenging class as the centerpiece of the day was a first draft that they believed they firmly disliked. They reexamined this piece, they talked about it, they noted strengths and weaknesses, they rewrote new drafts based on their own findings, and then, late in the day, we took a different tack and cannibalized the original for parts: I had them each choose a boring image from the original and write an ode to it. The results were delightful: sometimes funny, always detailed, a true reminder that even our worst writing can bring us into interesting places.

Most of these kids will not study creative writing in college. Few will major in the humanities; several won't go to college at all. Thus, the workshop model--the typical revision model in education--will not be useful for them. If they're going to keep writing, they're going to need to learn to do it on their own. They won't be able to rely on exterior advice.

And for those few who do study creative writing? They're going to need to learn to survive the workshop model. For every useful piece of advice they receive in a workshop, there will be an equivalent number of bad suggestions, not to mention the presence of aggressive posturers, faddish assumptions, and cult-of-personality professors. To weather this storm, they'll need to be clear-eyed and confident about their own ability to sift suggestions, make choices, see their own work, read their own obsessions and histories.

We walk a lonely road as writers.

And these young people are so eager. It is humbling.

Lying in bed, listening to the log trucks roll by, listening to the heat click on, listening to my fingers on the keys, lying in bed, listening to my brain wheedle Don't get up Don't get up

Dumb things I have done: leaving The Three Musketeers on the counter at home, being forced to read whatever I can find in this apartment, which is: a Joan Collins bodice ripper

Reading the Joan Collins bodice ripper over dinner, reading the Joan Collins bodice ripper in the tub, reading the Joan Collins bodice ripper in bed, and still not caring if I ever learn the ending

I admit it: The Three Musketeers is not haute-literature either

Thinking about coffee (not yet available), thinking about class (three hours in the future), thinking about my eyes flickering shut (the Joan Collins bodice ripper is extremely boring), thinking about the log trucks rumbling past

This small window into the groggy first moments of Dawn has been brought to you by Brain: The Intelligent Choice (rev. ed.) and by Loghorraea or Bust (opening in theaters this summer).

It's Monday morning, and the end of my sweet week at home. This afternoon I'll be on the road again, I'll teach tomorrow, and then there will be the long drive back. So the morning will be filled with editing and exercise and housework and loose-end gathering, before I climb into the car for the journey north.

All in all, I feel pretty good. I never did catch Tom's terrible cold, and that is a big plus. I've had eight days in my own bed; I caught up with a ton of editing and class planning; I worked on poem drafts; I read about seventeenth-century France; I did lots of walking; I cooked and went to the movies and went to the beach and saw a harbor seal and ate fried diner potatoes and hung around with this guy I like and had long phone conversations with our kids. I'm ready to roll into March.

Already one of the Poetry Kitchen classes I announced over the weekend, "From Draft to Dream," is half full, so that's a good thing too. There's been a long gap between the end of my Frost Place era and the beginning of this what's-next era, and I've worried about losing momentum. But so far, so good. And I'm excited about teaching a revision session. I've been thinking a lot about revision in the context of my high schoolers and my teaching conference, and of course I think about it all the time as regards my own work. But I'm not a fan of the workshop model, which is the standard teaching tool for revision, so I've been experimenting with other ways to enter into community-based conversations around the revision process. I'm looking forward to trying them out in this session.

 

We had such a plain and lovely day yesterday . . . an early breakfast, and then an early walk in the Laudholm Farm wildlife refuge--salt marshes, red maple swamps, and a long stretch of Atlantic beach. The sky was a busy swirl of shape and color; the breakers rolled in. Everywhere we saw life: an eagle, an osprey, a clutter of plovers racing along the edge of the surf. Terns and gulls, a huddle of black ducks, and a pair of pileated woodpeckers tearing up a dead tree. A flock of eiders coasting the waves and one handsome harbor seal flaunting his whiskers, as curious about us as we were about him.

And then the drive home, the quiet this-n-that day, both of us mostly in our workrooms but back and forth for conversations, then lighting the stove in the late afternoon, drinking a beer, playing cribbage, and then I adjourned to the kitchen to make clean-out-the-freezer risotto: chicken, maitake mushrooms, chard from the garden, lots of garlic and fresh broth, alongside roasted cabbage and a carrot and radish slaw.

These are the kinds of days that are a friendship. Two people ambling companionably through the hours. It is not what I thought a love affair would be, when I was eighteen. Still, the flame burns clear and bright, under its hurricane glass.

* * *

One of the things I worked on yesterday afternoon was the announcement of two upcoming poetry classes. I think I mentioned, a few months ago, that Maudelle, Teresa, and I were planning to restart some online programming under the aegis of The Poetry Kitchen. That website is still under construction, but I've temporarily created a tab for it on this blog.

I'll be offering two Zoom classes this spring: "Structure and Song" is a version of the introductory manuscript class I've taught many times before that will meet on three Sunday afternoons in May ($200). "From Draft to Dream" is a day-long revision class ($75). I hope you'll consider joining me. I know Zoom is no one's favorite medium, but I've figured out some ways to make it palatable, and it certainly eases the difficulties of distance.

I got up at 5, per usual; took a shower, made coffee, brought Tom a cup, and now I sit here waking up, trying to get ready for our early morning outing. We need to be on the road by 6:30, to be at the opening of the tiny Palace Diner in Biddeford at 7, so we can make sure we snag seats at the counter. We first ate here a couple of weeks ago, on our way to Vermont, and it's a top-notch diner--compact, shabby, with a personable waitress and excellent food: really good coffee, some of the best fried potatoes I've ever had, delicious homemade hash. We decided then we needed to find a reason to come back. So our plan this morning is a big diner breakfast and then a quick drive south for a stroll through the salt marshes and beach at Laudholm Farm in Wells. It's early for migration sightings, but the seabirds should be busy and probably the hawks too. And we love walking on this protected seafront.

I'll be on the road again on Monday, heading north to Monson, so I'm eager to make this weekend ours. For two days neither of us has to work or be anywhere special. The house cleaning is done. The sheets and towels are washed. Tom's still coughing, but he's feeling less dragged down. So we're concentrating on little good times--a diner, a walk, a breath of sea wind.

On the kitchen counter sits a stoneware jar of pink hyacinths, just beginning to open. March arrives this week, and my garden will begin to awake, and the beauty of these greenhouse blooms stirs my blood a bit. Yesterday morning, after walking in the rain and snow showers, I stood outside in the yard, looking down into the leaf-mulched beds. I glimpsed the edge of tulip leaves, daffodil spikes, buds on the quince. A warm winter, an early spring. We live in uneasy times. I am unnerved by the weather, but still my eyes delight in green life.

Friday. Darkness. A small chill rain.

I sit at the dining room table with my coffee and you, as Tom slowly wakes up on the couch. He's had a cold for a week, and the cough just won't die, so one or the other of us has been sleeping downstairs every night. For some reason, I remain cold-free, but he needs a weekend and a magic wand, poor man.

He's been clomping off to work every day, tired and sick, and I've been climbing the stairs to work every day, rested and healthy. It's been a sad state of affairs.

But I've made a giant dent in my editing project, written up class plans for next week's Monson session, begun detailed work on the teaching conference syllabus, finished reading Munro's story collection, starting reading Anny Thackeray Ritchie's book about Madame de Sevigne, worked on a poem draft, answered a thousand emails, and walked for miles . . . which is exactly what I hoped my week would be.

I've also done some fancier-than-usual cooking. For a while, I've been meaning to make kabocha squash gnocchi, and last night I finally got around to it. They require a lot of steps (roast the squash, make the dough, shape the gnocchi, boil them, sauté them), but the end results were divine, rolled in salty brown sage butter and served alongside roast chicken and a beet and pumpkin-seed salad. I was very happy with that meal.

So today, on the heels of that beautiful dinner, with the rain drizzling on the window panes, with the cat crunching up chow and Tom sighing and flicking on the light, with the small rooms like islands in the darkness, with my work finished and my work unbegun, with the kettle steaming gently on the stove and my fingers finding their path among the keys, I take a deep breath of this, our life.

 Two quotations from Alice Munro's story collection The View from Castle Rock:

And as the saying goes, about this matter of what molds us or warps us, if it's not one thing it will be another. At least that was a saying of my elders in those days. Mysterious, uncomforting, unaccusing. (from "Fathers")

*

I thought that the appointment I had was for a biopsy, but it turned out not to be. It was an appointment to let the city doctor decide whether he would do a biopsy, and after examining my breast and the results of the mammogram, he decided that he would. . . . The biopsy was set for a date two weeks ahead and I was given a sheet with instructions about how to prepare for it.

I said that two weeks seemed like quite a while to wait.

At this stage of the game, the doctor said, two weeks was immaterial.

That was not what I had been led to believe. But I did not complain--not after a look at some of the people in the waiting room. I am over sixty. My death would not be a disaster. Not in comparison with the death of a young mother, a family wage-earner, a child. It would not be apparent as a disaster. (from "What Do You Want to Know For?")

Though I've reread this collection often, I had completely forgotten both of these passages. It's odd how an admired book can be so familiar and so strange at the same time.

Munro is my favorite living fiction writer, and she is very old now. She won't be living for much longer, yet I still tend to think of her as a sly great-aunt rather than a object of literary worship. As in, "She's told a lot of tales over the years but we'll likely never know the truth." Or "That's the way she's always been. Nothing she'd do would surprise me." Or "Her kind isn't so common anymore." Aggrieved pronouns combined with reluctant admiration. The greed of the reader: "Do you mean this is all I get?"

It's unfair, but maybe the still-living are always unfair to the almost-dead. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Stop lollygagging. Put some spring in your step. Don't leave me.

Yesterday was a quiet, quiet day. No phone calls, no chatter . . . just desk, clothesline, wood boxes, and my own walking feet. As a result, I finished editing two chapters, worked on a poem draft, read a chunk of Alice Munro's The View from Castle Rock, simmered a pot of minestrone, walked a few miles through the chill sea air, even briefly lay down on the couch and slept. This week is in no way a vacation, but it is a rest, in its own style.

Today I've got to add in some class planning and my core-exercise regimen, but otherwise the hours will follow their same plain path. Tom and I might go out to the movies tonight, to see an old Marlene Dietrich flick, if his cold behaves itself. If not, we'll hole up by the wood stove.

A steady home routine is its own restorative--the small round of obligations, the necessary duties: lugging firewood, cleaning out ashes, washing dishes, pinning towels to the line, trudging down a road, reading a book, writing down words. I speak for myself, of course. You may despise all of this, or be overwhelmed by it. I don't know why I'm made this way.

And yet my mind is sharpened and opened by the routine work of my hands, my shoulders, my legs. My heart-stare deepens. 

I worked at my desk all morning, and then my friend Gretchen came and snagged me for a chilly walk, my friend Angela called me for a long catch-up-with-everything talk, my friend Sue emailed about a visit next week . . . and it was a just a really nice day. To be thought of, by people I love; to have quiet time in the house; to retrieve a sense of plain steadiness.

Today will be another unassuming day: laundry, editing, cooking, walking. Maine's in a cold snap. It was minus 2 when I left Harmony on Sunday morning. Portland has been warmer, but not warm. Still, the bright skies are buoyant. Snowdrops are blooming in a yard down the street. The house is cozy and neat, and my little study--its handmade bookshelves and desks, the small blue easy chair I found on the street, the modest north-facing sunlight, the scattered mementos of dear ones . . . it is the nicest tiny workroom I can imagine. I am glad to be spending the week there.

The older I get, the happier I am with small. Miniature garden, miniature rooms. And yet I also feel as if my life has gotten so much more expansive. I was very lonely in the woods, though I treasured that loneliness, and I treasured those woods. Now I am not so lonely, and I treasure that too.

This recent breast-cancer scare has been, in its way, a cautionary tale. In the three weeks between the first and second radiology visits, I thought a lot about what I didn't want to do. Panic. Pretend. Damage affection. I was lucky enough to have another chance to keep trying.

This photo makes me laugh every time I catch sight of it. I look like a gray-haired five-year-old beaming at my parents before a school concert. And here, while I'm thinking of it, is a video clip from that very show: "The Lost Child"--Morgan Cameron, vocals and mandolin; Clifford Cameron, piano; Dawn Potter, vocals and fiddle; Brian Smith, bass; Sunny Stutzman, bass and vocals.

By the time I got home yesterday, mid-morning, I was completely exhausted. I took a nap on the couch before noon, then got up and did the grocery shopping, lounged around for the rest of the afternoon before making dinner, then went to bed early and slept hard all night. I wasn't at all sick. But it's been a tiring few weeks, with very few days off and a whole lot of mental stress. And Saturday's show, while great, was a long, long day of work and socializing and performing, bookended with driving. I guess it was the last straw, at least as regards my stamina.

In any case, after a day of semi-prostration I feel much more like myself. It's school vacation week in Maine, so I won't be heading to Monson. No poetry group on Thursday evening. No appointments or meetings or rehearsals, at least none that have been scheduled yet. Just a work week at home, followed by a weekend at home. What a novelty.

I'll edit, I'll read, I'll walk, I'll write, I'll cook, I'll sleep. It will be a thrill-a-minute and I can't wait.

It's five degrees in Wellington, Maine. The light is just beginning to break through the trees, and downstairs Steve is rattling the wood stove, starting the water to boil for coffee--the comforting sounds of a winter morning.

I got in last night close to eleven, after a winding familiar drive through snow-skimmed darkness. The theater in Dover-Foxcroft had been packed--a sold-out house for Sid Stock, a big happy crowd, such a touching scene. So many locals love Sid Stutzman so much. And the show itself was tight and strong, good musicians playing well and with pleasure. I had the happiness of hanging out with a couple of my very first students, young men in their thirties now, to whom I'd taught music and poetry during my seven-year tenure at the Harmony School. I played with old men who were thrilled and emotional to be part of the celebration and with young people who were nervy and serious. Our nine-year-old stage manager solemnly stalked the backstage boards, wearing a fake headset and an invisible watch that he kept checking. It was a lovely night, and I was so fortunate to be part of it.

And now, today, I'll rise from this warm bed, get dressed, go downstairs to drink coffee with Steve, and then wind my way out of the homeland and back to Portland, its far-flung sister. I am full of feelings, and the air is full of cold. It is February in Maine, and before long the sap will begin to run.

I want to thank everyone who posted or emailed good wishes yesterday. I am so happy to have you in my life. I know I owe you all personal responses, but once again I am rushing out to hit the road this morning--heading to Dover-Foxcroft for Sid Stock, a big show in honor of Sid Stutzman, founder and front man of the Doughty Hill Band and well-known local singer-songwriter. So many of us who have played with him over the years are regathering at the Center Theater for a night to celebrate him and his music. For me, it will be old-home day in the homeland, and of course I'm a bit nervy about my fiddle skills, after such a long hiatus.

In central Maine, and maybe elsewhere, too, playing in a band is traditionally a man's world. Women do sing, do play fiddle or bass or mandolin, but the bulk of the guitarists, banjo players, and drummers are men. Tonight, out of maybe fifteen different performers, only two of us will be women. I've enjoyed getting to know the local guys via this particular language. We're not engaged in their usual small talk: Trump or snowmobiles or ice fishing or farming. We're discussing the minutiae of harmony singing and the emotional tug of a ritardando. Music is an outlet for feeling, and playing in a band with a bunch of local guys is a way to live in that world alongside them--a world they often otherwise do not reveal publicly. It's very moving, really.

So tonight will be sweet and probably tearful, and very likely my last public performance. I don't have a musical circle in Portland, and I am not good at seeking such things out. Maybe I will accidentally overlap with someone, someday, who will want to play a few songs with me. But this might be it.

About three weeks ago, after a routine mammogram, I learned that the radiologist had identified a spot on my left breast. I needed a follow-up scan.

I stayed fairly calm in the intervening weeks. I slept and ate and went to work et cetera, but of course I felt like a thousand-pound anvil was poised over my head. I talked to a few other women who'd gone through this process or had knowledge about it, and they were optimistic. Their conversation was a huge help, but still: if a crisis were coming, I needed to be mentally prepared. And so I tried to be ready, in a non-panicking, non-hysterical way, for really bad news.

Finally yesterday morning arrived, and I drove across town and up the hill to my follow-up mammogram. It was a usual sort of day at the hospital: hallways filled with misery, helicopter landing on the roof, grim-faced families in elevators, bleary doctors clutching oversized cups of coffee.

Eventually, the radiology tech bounced into the waiting room, caroling, "I thought I'd see you again." This was not reassuring.

She wielded her power, which is to say I went through another round of topless squeezing in an ice-cold office, and then she told me to go back to the waiting room. The radiologist would pronounce my doom shortly. So I sat in a blue vinyl chair and watched a big stinkbug that was posing on the tile floor, waving its antennae like it was trying to get a nurse's attention. Magically no one stepped on it. I wondered if stinkbugs were used as augury in ancient Greece, and, if so, were they reliable? As good as eagles and the entrails of goats? Or more like last-ditch-effort omens?

And then the tech bounced back into the waiting room, crooked a beckoning finger at me, and pulled me into a confab around the corner. "Completely benign," she sang. "Nothing to worry about. Back to your regular screening schedule." My eyes filled with tears, and she flung her arms around me. Behind us orderlies were wheeling a moaning woman through the corridor, and I was standing in a puddle of bad overhead lighting being embraced by a stranger because I was well. The world is a mixed-up story.

Yesterday was so cold and windy--a bitter day, with an icy breeze whipping up off the bay--and tonight we're supposed to get a few inches of snow. Yet the light has shifted, the days are longer, and cardinals and chickadees are singing in the bare branches. When I stepped outside into the wind to empty the stove ashes, the avian world was a-spin--gulls and crows careening among the high gusts, a flock of pigeons wheeling over the roofs, nuthatches flickering up and down the maple trunks, jays quarreling on the fence. 

Everywhere the birds sift and flutter, sail and scratch. Last weekend, on a walk amid the Lake Champlain dairy fields, Tom and I watched a courting pair of northern harriers flicker over the brown pastures, their thin cries fading like the squeak of ghosts.

This morning I've got an appointment I don't want to go to. So afterward I might take myself for a walk by the bay . . . I might find the wind, I might discover what the sea birds--the eiders and the buffleheads, the cormorants and the black ducks--are up to on this cold February day.

We had a four-hour band rehearsal yesterday, which meant I didn't get home till nearly seven, much later than expected. But fortunately Tom stepped into the breach, whipping up something delicious with shrimp and whatever vegetables he could find in the bin. It was very pleasant to walk through the door and discover that I had no responsibilities.

This morning I'll need to spend some time with Hopkins's sonnets, and then edit, of course, and undergo my exercise regimen, and deal with laundry, and so on and so forth--all the usual weekday obligations. But it's Valentine's Day, which is always a cheerful holiday in Portland. For years an anonymous Valentine bandit has hung heart banners all over the city the night before, even out on the harbor forts, so that on Valentine's morning the whole city wakes up to fluttering red and white. And though the bandit died last year (his identity was finally revealed in his obituary), his family plans to continue his silly but oddly comforting tradition.

These small crazy obsessions . . . I mean, what kind of person dedicates his life to being an anonymous Valentine's Day bandit? And yet the rest of us gain so much from the gift of plain good will, from an exuberant burst of affection, without expectations or proselytizing. We wake in the morning and the banners are snapping in the sea wind. Happy being-alive day to us all.

We're supposed to get a little snow today, but nothing much to speak of, which is good as I have to drive up to band practice this afternoon. It will be our final southern Maine practice session before Saturday's dress rehearsal and gig, and I've had to miss the past two because I've been teaching. So this snow had better not keep me down.

Yesterday I worked at my desk for most of the day, but I did get outside for a walk with my neighbor, and I did get a chance to mix up the new honey-vanilla frozen yogurt recipe I'd been wanting to try. For some reason, homemade frozen yogurt can be tricky--I think because the water content in the yogurt can get icy. But this recipe's got a bit of gelatin in it, and the result was velvety and delicious. Success, at least so far, though we'll see how it firms up overnight.

It's a dark morning here in the little northern city by the sea, and my thoughts are quiet, scattered. I'd like to spend time with my poem drafts this morning. I have to spend time with the editing project. I need to prep for band rehearsal. I need to read some of Gerard Manley Hopkins's sonnets so that I can talk about them with Teresa tomorrow. In the meantime, I'm absorbed in Hardwick's Sleepless Nights, which is a deeply sad tale that is really no tale at all--it's more like a bundle of photographs that are related to one another but only via the speaker's memory, experiences, or imagination, not because they necessarily intersect with one another. It's a painful book, so filled with sorrow and regret, yet extraordinarily vivid, and I can only read it in short bursts--a kind of self-protection, I suppose; ladling out the beautiful sadness in small doses.

Otherwise, what am I doing? what am I here for? what matters? I am watching the small birds move through the bare trees and shrubberies. I am sweeping the dirt from the floors. I am carrying a cup of coffee upstairs to my beloved. I am trembling like a human being in a small bubble of self-doubt and foreboding, which is also a small bubble of everyday sweetness. It is the same old story.

After a weirdly warm weekend, the temperature has dropped back down into the 20s. The furnace is rumbling, the coffee is hot, and I slept in my own bed so feel reasonably rested and ready for a week at work. Mostly, I'll be editing, with band practice and class planning and some appointments and meetings slipped in around the edges. But I won't be on the road again till Saturday, and that, at least, is something.

I've been reading Elizabeth Hardwick's Sleepless Nights. I've been motoring up and down the hills of Vermont. I've been standing at a window and staring out into the blue morning.

What is the word for the word you can't figure out how to say?

Fortunately, there is the embrace of coming home.

Self-Portrait as Memorandum

Dawn Potter

 

Dear sir I request

attention to whom it

may concern which is

my concern dear sir 

dear colleague I beg

a favor I suggest a strategy:

 

Destroy after reading 

in re my thoughts

I attach a graph

kindly do not photocopy

dear sir dear sir

I am your obedient servant:

 

I beg you to reconsider

do not forward

for your eyes only I request your

presence your signature your

identification code

do not repeat:

 

Remain prudent

highlight in three colors

file under routine

under top secret under

to be shredded

dear sir:

 

I lie upon your blotter

fold me

spindle me

you know

they are listening at the door:

Histoire

 

Dawn Potter

The usual thing:

Time stood still for years, then fell off the table.

 

This is a portrait of what I was, and wasn’t.

Parched throat, tears exploding.

 

I stumbled over every cat on the stairs.

Who else could I be?

 

Twenty-six letters equaled

not enough words.

 

There was sleep. And simple memory.

I sewed Simplicity patterns and wished for beauty.

 

But what is perfume that no one opens?

When I lifted my violin, the men at the bar

 

begged for Skynyrd, not Coltrane.

So I volunteered to be lonely.

[first published in On the Seawall (2023)]

It's Friday, it's been a long week, and it won't end today, as tomorrow morning I'll be driving to Vermont for a speed visit with my family . . . over and back in two days because of the pressure of Tom's work schedule. We are tired, we are going to be more tired, but we're pretending to have fun and the pretense is amusing us, so that's something.

I've got lots of Friday housework to deal with, grocery shopping to do, but I also need to look at some of the poem drafts I wrote last night. I feel a little shaken up by them. They arrived suddenly but with a fair amount of pain--car accidents in the guise of poem drafts, I guess you could call them--and I have to figure out what happened, and what will.

That kind of experience leaves a throb that doesn't easily fade away, and this morning I am still feeling the exposure and the bewilderment. The making side of me is triumphant, but the rest of me vibrates like a picked scab. Such are the masochisms of poetry.

Tomorrow morning you may or may not hear from me. We're going to try to get going very early so as to make the most of our brief visit, and I may be rushing around doing all of the things I forgot to get done today. I hope not, but I wouldn't put it past me.

On another note, the Monson Arts teaching conference is already half full. If you're considering attending, you might want to make a move soon. I'm really pleased that we're filling so early, but I don't want you to lose your place.

Good morning, and so sorry for missing yesterday's post, but I slightly overslept so didn't have time to linger.

The snow is thick up north, but the skies are brilliant blue, and the sun, rising up over the woods, is vivid. Conversation by the wood stove turns to garden and greenhouse. Firewood piles are dwindling, as are winter supplies of onions, garlic, potatoes. But deer steaks sizzle in the pan, blueberry crisp bubbles in the oven, talk skitters back to childhood. And at bedtime, in a stovepipe-heated room, I press my face against the open window and breathe in the dense oxygen of the homeland.

Now here I sit, in my small house by the bay. Once upon a time, I thought I had left the homeland completely, that I was adrift, but now I see that I have simply slipped my canoe into another watershed. The dark inland rivers are also the tidal rivers that flow to the sea. These places are not separate. The long fingers of the rivers curl me back into the woods, release me back toward the gulf. I travel them, as people have always traveled these life-routes. The great names of the great rivers--Kennebec, Penobscot--are the names of the people who loved them.

This place, Maine. Last night, my friend said she'd read somewhere a claim along these lines: "You're a real Mainer if you arrived here once and then never left." Okay then, we all said. We came when we were young. We stuck it out--the cold, the loneliness, the weary work. And here we are. We count.

Well, surprise, surprise: here I still am in Portland. I fully expected to be blinkily driving up a dark gravel road at this very moment, but the Covid gods descended upon the school where I was supposed to be working, and my visiting-artist stint was abruptly postponed till March.

So I didn't exactly get a day off, as I had to edit all day instead of driving for half of it, but I did get another night at home in my own bed.

The other good news is that I think (maybe, possibly) I have finally won the deeply stupid insurance company fight that I have been waging for two weeks. Do they create these scenarios on purpose so that customers just give up and pay? I'm not a conspiracy theorist as a rule, but jeez. For two weeks I've been explaining to one customer-service representative after another that (1) my doctor is in their network (he appears on their own damn web page as a recommended provider) and (2) the bills they are trying to make me pay are for preventative care (annual physical, vaccines, routine mammogram) clearly covered by my plan. Yes, yes, say the voices on the phone. And then I get re-billed. It's so dumb.

But maybe the ordeal is over. Maybe I can finally think of something else besides strangling corporate incompetents. This morning, on my unexpected day off from teaching, I'll go for a walk, eat some oatmeal, and then reimmerse myself in my big editing project. Midafternoon I'll drive north to Wellington, and then tomorrow I'll be in Monson with my usual students. It will be the first day of the big revision hootenanny I've been plotting out for them. Always it's a giant question with young writers (and with older apprentice writers too): how can I teach them to find their own paths into revision; to see revision as an absorbing activity, one that's just as interesting as generative writing; to look clearly but not judgmentally at their various drafts?

The great thing about my class structure is that I have a ton of time to experiment with this process. Basically, I'm going to begin by breaking down the activity into three separate class sessions: (1) revising a draft they think they like, (2) revising a draft they think they don't like, (3) revising a draft they are puzzled by. Tomorrow we'll be considering approach 1: working with a draft they like, maybe one they think is so good that it doesn't need any revision at all, maybe one that they're resistant to messing around with. But they will be messing around with it.  Or, in a more sweet-tongued formulation, we'll spend the whole day celebrating what they do well and then doing more of it.

This week I am back at the mill: Monday starts with a morning of editing and fighting with the insurance company, then driving all afternoon, an overnight up north, then on the road Tuesday at dawn for an all-day high school gig. And that's just the beginning.

Yesterday was my breather, and I tried to make the most of it. I did walk, I did read, I did nap. I made a big Sunday dinner, filled with vegetables and comfort. I settled my thoughts and hung out with my sweetheart.  So this morning I feel pretty good: rested but not sluggish and more or less ready for the showdown.

Tomorrow morning will be cramped, so don't worry if you don't hear from me till Wednesday. 

Yesterday's class was fun: also hard work. I ended up with 12 pages of new writing from the prompts that Teresa and I cooked up around notions of personification, synesthesia, bibliomancy, and an old learn-to-speak-Esperanto schoolbook. I hope the participants' notebooks are equivalently fat and that they're excited by what they've uncovered.

Tomorrow I'll be on the road again, away from home for two nights so I can teach a day in Milo and another in Monson. Then working at home for a couple of days, and then on the road again, to Vermont and a weekend of family matters.

So today is my only day off for quite a while, and I intend to treat it as such. A walk, a movie, a nap . . . who knows what comfortable unexciting adventures lie ahead? I eagerly await them. Of course I won't laze around every second. I've been dipping into Hermione Lee's biography of Virginia Woolf. I need to spend time with my friend Betsy's poem draft. I need to go to the grocery store and I need to do some laundry. I'll make Sunday dinner: probably oven-fried chicken alongside a fennel and cherry tomato salad, maybe mashed potatoes with garlic and parsley, and then fresh raspberry sorbet for dessert.

But I'll get started slowly.

Sunlight is streaking the houses now, and above them the sky is as blue as baby's shirt.

I am tired, and I have worries that I am slotting away into rational pigeonholes. This is necessary and useful and allows me to go on, but the effort adds to the weariness. It can be hard to be sensible, hard to be reasonable, hard to be patient. You know what I mean.

Still, the sky is as blue as a baby's shirt, fresh from the drawer, smelling of trees and wind. 

I thought I might get the chance to sleep in a bit this morning, but no. My internal alarm went off, my cat alarm went off, and here I am, upright and awake and listening to the washing machine churn.

Today Teresa and I are leading an all-day zoom reunion for 2023 teaching conference participants, where we'll be focusing on the notion of chance encounters as a prompt for new writing. I'll tell you more about the concept tomorrow so as not to spoil the surprise for any participants who might be reading this blog. But I will say that we had a lot of fun putting it together, and I hope it turns out to be as entertaining as we hope.

Yesterday was a day of walking--not a bad thing before a day of zoom-chair. First, after breakfast, I walked to Gretchen's house to drink magnificent coffee and start planning our June class together, which will be an amalgam of improvisational theater and improvisational poems. It's always so fun to work with a teaching artist who focuses on a different art form from my own. Plus, Gretchen is 100 percent lovable.

Then I slammed out some housework and a bit of editing before I went on a long walk with my neighbor, also very enjoyable, as she's a sharp-eyed lawyer and I always learn something I never knew before and she has the fun of laughing at me when I get overheated about stupid men and Taylor Swift.

The temperature was 40 degrees, I glimpsed snowdrops in a nearby yard, and then I came home and made borscht and Ethiopian injera and a big salad, the sort of meal that feels like I'm actively saving my life. As I eat, I can feel the nourishment spreading through my body: the sweet-sour heat of the beet soup, the dark moist circles of bread, the kiss of olive oil and greens. Surely, a bowl of borscht solves all ills.

So I'll pause here, in my couch corner, for a few moments this morning, and remember the goodness of food, the goodness of walking, the goodness of easy chatter--oh, these sturdy joys of the earth. And then I'll heave myself into action: a shower, a quick stroll around the block, a load of laundry, a dish of oatmeal; papers gathered, thoughts realigned; then the dive into my workday, poems and poems and poems, with leftover borscht to look forward to at lunch.

It's warmer than it's been: 32 degrees and dripping at 5 a.m. The cat rushed out into the darkness, then rushed back in five minutes later, but at least he had a small airing. He does hate winter. You couldn't pay that pet to run away from home.

It's trash day in the neighborhood, and I need to get off the couch and start emptying bins and lugging compost. It's sheet-washing day in the household, downstairs-vacuuming-and-mopping day, and I'll get to all of it, I'll get to all of it, but for a few more minutes I'm going to sit here with my coffee, staring down at the fat biography of Virginia Woolf, at the letters of Jane Carlyle, at a half-done crossword puzzle and a stack of half-read New Yorkers, the history of Cabeza de Vaca's journey, an atlas of the Gulf of Maine . . . the litter of our reading lives.

Later this morning, after I muscle through a batch of housework and my exercises, I'll walk over to my friend Gretchen's house so that we can start sketching out a class we'll be teaching together in June. Eventually I'll do some editing; but, given my long teaching day tomorrow, I hope I can snag a bit of time for myself today, time that isn't just housecleaning or cooking or hanging laundry. I've got notebook blurts to transcribe, new drafts to beetle into, books to read, the violin to practice: the other face of work, the private chores, the work that affects no one but myself.

It takes a lot of energy to be a poet, to keep stuffing words into the crevices of my quotidian duties. Sometimes I wonder how long I can keep this up. Maybe one day I'll fade into watching Hallmark movies and cat videos; the days of poetry will be over; I will learn a different life. I find this hard to imagine, but the future is a murky trail.

The morning is wintry and dark--freezing fog a-glimmer under the streetlights, snowpack crusted like sugar. It's Thursday, another work day in my endless week of work days: editing, then housework, then this evening I'll go out to write. I would have been happy to stay in bed a bit longer, to burrow back into my blurry dreams about circus tricks and sunscreen. But here I am, awake, sipping my black coffee, learning to be upright again, listening to the sighs of a yawning house.

I've been rereading Woolf's last novel, Between the Acts, which is so extraordinary, so filled with light and wry affection, though her own life was smothering in shadow. I went out last night to watch 42nd Street, a pre-code musical featuring a very young Ginger Rogers in a supporting role, starring Ruby Keeler and Dick Powell, packed with a strange mixture of Depression-era desperation and lavish, bizarrely filmed chorus lines, as if "We have no money, but forty pairs of legs will save us." I got a haircut and felt like it might, in fact, save me--which is the mystery of haircuts, the clean bounce over the brow, the sudden optimism that arises: "ah, now everything is better!"

And now, this morning, I am thinking of a long walk, I am thinking of clean laundry, I am thinking of a notebook and a teacup and my new desk, gleaming with paint and varnish. I am thinking of my brisk body, still holding up after all these years, and I am trying very, very hard to not fear the unknown.

And, now on another note: Hey, you should come to Monson, Maine, this summer! Spaces are filling in the Conference for Poetry and Learning; new people and familiar people are already signing up. It is such a lovely site, and Teresa and I are plotting and planning for a magnificent week, and we want you to be there. Interestingly, I've only received one scholarship application thus far. So if you are hesitating because of money matters, please be in touch. I think I can solve that problem.