After a spate of balmy days, the temperature dropped back into the 40s last night. So this morning I happily lit the wood stove, and now, for a few minutes, I am sitting in my corner watching orange flame leap into the kindling, bright dancer in the dusky no-light of early morning.

The house is clean for another week--fresh sheets on the bed, fresh towels in the bathrooms, floors mopped and sinks scrubbed. I ran some errands, and made an apple pie, and went out to write last night. So today will be a sort of day off--a bit of prep for tomorrow's class, a trip to the post office, but mostly reading and writing and walking and gardening, in whatever order and at whatever pace seems right. Basking in front of this eager fire seems like the right way to begin such an airy day.

I finished reading Olivia Laing's memoir about gardening, and I've just started reading my friend Lori Ostlund's story in the new Best American Short Stories. I love Lori's work: in fact, we became friendly because I wrote her a fan letter about a story I'd accidentally run across in a little free library. Since then, we've kept in cordial touch, and she and her wife, also a fine writer, actually attended my zoom book launch last week. The internet is supremely aggravating but it also has its gifts, and one is this thread stretching from Maine poet to California story writers--people I would otherwise know only as unreachable names on a page.

I've written fan letters to various writers, most of whom never respond, but now and again they do. I've received a few fan letters myself--always a shock. I used to write with a painful hesitating modesty, framing myself as a minor acolyte, etcetera. These days I try to treat myself with more respect, to write as an admiring colleague rather than a groveling apprentice. It probably makes no difference to the receiver, but it makes me feel less dog-like.

I do know, from small experience, that receiving a fan letter can be disarming. Automatic hackles rise, a self-defensiveness: "Who is this stranger walking into my house? What will they demand from me?" Also, of course, there's the embarrassment, the wash of shame, as if I've fooled somebody into thinking that I'm a writer worth writing to. But when I can wrestle through those porcupine barriers, I'm always touched and amazed that an unknown person has thought enough of my words to tell me so.  And often these correspondents surprise me, say things about my writing that I hadn't noticed myself, opened my eyes to new ideas or sources. I hope the fan letters I send have the same tonic effect.