I haven't talked about kitchen matters lately, but that doesn't mean I haven't been cooking. And last night's salad was so extremely beautiful--red and yellow tomatoes, basil, seared halloumi--that I was impelled to document it. I served the tomatoes alongside rare steak marinated in lime and garlic, a chard tian, and a mix of rice (wild, white, red, brown). It was a lovely meal, and there are lots of leftovers, which likely means steak salad for dinner tonight.

It's good to have the supper problem solved because today and tomorrow I'll be in class, experimenting with some prompt-thoughts linked to syntax. The models will be a sheaf of prose and poetry excerpts, with the prose being mostly (though not exclusively) samples from high modernists such as Virginia Woolf, Henry Green, and Elizabeth Bowen. I also extend beyond them, in both directions--back to George Eliot and Henry James, forward to Iris Murdoch and (I know this seems odd) John Le Carre.  The related poetry I won't discuss right now, as I'm keeping that a surprise for participants. My hope, though, is that class members will see how sentences themselves, in their positioning, in their subtle variety, can pull a poem draft onto a page.

These classes are always shots in the dark, though mostly they seem to work, if not always in the ways I'd predicted. Which is part of the fun, I guess . . . the not knowing, the veer into strange spaces.