"So I was, like most artists, deformed by my art. I was shaped."

                                                      --Louise Erdrich, "Shamengwa"

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Over the weekend I finished reading Erdrich's story collection The Red Convertible and began reading Percival Everett's James, which I'd tried to take out from the library months ago and which finally arrived last week after I'd entirely forgotten about it. Now that I'm living in a home filled with clean and airy shelves, I am happy to be starting a new novel that I don't immediately have to find space for, a book that will return from whence it came.

The spring cleaning (summer cleaning?) continues around here: yesterday I finally finished the kitchen--all of the cupboards and drawers washed out and reorganized, the refrigerator scrubbed, the closet vacuumed. Next up: windows and winter woolens and coats. Jeesh, a housewife's work is never done.

"Deformed by my art." I am still fidgeting with that notion . . . not the deformed part so much as the art part, which is a term that I find porous and inexact, at least as regards my own life. Am I more of a poet than I am a teacher or a cook or a gardener or even a striving partner to my beloved? I don't know how to answer that question. Last week, during our Rockland workshop, Gretchen emphasized the term maker. In her view, this wording was a way to take ourselves off the hot seat. We don't have to be artists. We can simply rest in the present-tense of creating whatever it is we are creating at the moment. I take her point, but also . . . I want to be an artist. I am an artist. I obsess over the making. The making thickens over time. I overflow with the making. I cannot contain it. But what is being shaped?

As for being deformed. Well, I can offer physical proof of that. When I put my hands together, I can see that all of the fingers on my left hand are notably longer than the fingers on my right hand . . . at least half an inch longer. They are also all crooked, all of them curved out of shape. This is the result of extreme instrument practice at a very young age. The bones of my left hand grew around the neck of a violin.

And yet I did not write violin on my litany of art. I don't know where to put it. I don't know where or how one art changes into another; I don't know to track the influence of my own making. It is all so complicated.