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.