Today will be my sort-of day off, as I'll be zoom-teaching tomorrow. By sort-of day off I mean I won't be editing all day (though probably I'll put in a few hours) but will instead be prepping for tomorrow's class and trying to catch up on house obligations . . . all of which, you'll note, counts as work so I don't actually know why I'm pretending that today will be a holiday of any kind. But I will be off my usual weekday schedule, and I will have some breathing room around the edges, and I have been trained by society to denigrate my seven-days-a-week household labor, so no doubt all that feeds into my pretense.

Tomorrow Teresa and I will be leading a class for Monson and Frost Place alums that focuses on using visual prompts to generate new poem drafts. In a few ways it will be a sneak peak into our plans for this summer's poetry conference, which will center around notions of transformation. We've got a sizable group signed up, and temperatures in northern New England are supposed to drop below zero, so it should be a good day to curl up in a chair and talk and write.

I know I need to design and schedule another open Poetry Kitchen session for the spring, but I haven't had the headspace to create yet one more new thing. I've been working on a sonnet project with Teresa and Jeannie, working on a performance project with Teresa, Gretchen, and Gwynnie, writing new curriculum for the summer conference, tweaking my class plans for the high schoolers, plus reading stacks of books, both alone and in tandem. I've got plenty of poems I could start sorting through for a next collection, but I haven't made any headway there at all--I can't seem to find adequate open brain and body space. I guess this is why people go to artist residencies, but such luxuries are not in my future.

Well, everything will shake itself out in time, in some way or other. Either I'll put together a new collection or I won't. It's not the end of the world if I never publish another book.