I'm not writing well or fluidly these days, though I keep hammering out scraps of new work because that's my only way through these dead zones. This happens often during the summer and usually works itself out as the year wanes. I've always tended to do my best and most intense writing in the fall and winter. Once that made sense because the boys were back in school and I could find more time for myself. But I have no such explanation now; it's just become a seasonal pattern.

I could start focusing on putting together another poetry collection. I could even start thinking about an essay collection. However, I haven't shown any signs of propelling myself into either task. Instead I'm reading reading reading reading, and scribbling out a few unsatisfactory drafts, and drifting in and out of my quotidian chores and obligations. Call it a flotsam-and-jetsam period. I guess it's okay to be finishing nothing. I guess it has to be okay.

Still, these dry patches are hard. I feel more invisible than usual. I panic about whether or not anyone will--or even should--sign up for the classes I invent. I start comparing myself to my brilliant friends. Everyone else seems so vibrant, so full of words and ideas. I, meanwhile, am panting under the weight of Woolf and Whitman and the other lights who have made the work I long to make myself . . . and yet somehow, despite decades of striving, I have not managed to do what I crave to do.

But I had a huge and unexpected lift yesterday. Last fall, after Ray died, I wrote an essay about him, about our youth together, about the way in which our volatile friend group aged into a family constellation. I sent the piece out to a few places, and everyone rejected it. Then I stopped sending it out. And then, a few days ago, I tossed it back into the aether. Suddenly, yesterday, a response appeared in my inbox: yes, the editor would love to publish it. And then, at the end of his note, these words: "Dawn, do you know how great you are?"

I wanted to put my head down and cry . . . for Ray, for my own limping self-confidence, for the balm of these too-kind words. I am, of course, not great. Whitman is great. Woolf is great. I circle them, like a small and bedraggled crow. I wanted to put my head down and cry. The work is so hard. The sugar comes so rarely. The sweetness is so sweet.