The cold continues, one frigid morning after the next. I'm glad we have at least a little snow on the ground as insulation for the plants. I'm glad of a warm house and hot coffee. I'm not so glad about spending five-plus hours in the car for the sake of a twenty-minute reading, but it will be nice to see Julia and listen to her new poems. And the weather looks to be clear and I should get home by dark.

Yesterday I finished my first pass through the writing samples I'm judging--a giant job, done, until the next stages are scheduled. And I'm now also more than halfway done with the editing project, and I've prepped for next week's high schoolers as well. It's been a nose-to-the-grindstone week for sure, but oddly it hasn't been a frantic one. Every task seemed to fall between its allotted lines, a kind of work-dance, helped by long stretches of solitude and a clean and uncrowded house.

And so here I sit, temporarily at rest. The week, outside of this bubble of calm, has been bad--wincingly painful, horrifying, exactly what you and I knew it would be. He is a monster. Though I am still not reading or listening to news, the scent of rot is overpowering.

Considering this letter to you structurally, I see that this is the moment when I might be expected to toss out a string of rhetorical questions--what are our responsibilities as artists during this era of darkness? what do we owe to our communities? is poetry resistance? am I selfish for caring so hard about the small points of light? . . . and so on, etcetera, ad infinitum, blah blah blah, sigh.

The truth is that I have no idea. I have no idea at all.

I am sixty years old. I read a lot of books and I write a lot of books but I have never earned enough money to rise out of the working class. I am white and cis-gendered and thus privileged. I am a woman and aging and thus not privileged. I am successful, insofar as I do work that I value, insofar as I have raised children who are good, insofar as I am loved. I am invisible. I am financially precarious.

I have no power, except in very small and private realms. Every day I teeter between strength and weakness. All I can do is keep teetering, I guess.

And I do grip at a few sureties. It is right to care about others. It is right to believe in art. It is right to take science seriously. It is right to love the earth.