It's raining in Portland this morning, but as far as I can tell the bad weather hasn't kicked into central Maine yet, so I'm assuming I'll be on Zoom all day with the kids. Well, that's okay: I've got plenty for us to do, and my usual classroom assistant will be able to greet them when they come in, and sit with them in the room, and be a real human voice.

I cleaned floors yesterday, I commented on a student manuscript, I started a new editing project, I laid the stone paths between the new garden boxes . . . it was a productive-enough day, though also a raw and damp and glowering one. Today won't be any better in that regard, and the forecast for our weekend on the island looks just as rainy and cold. I guess we won't be climbing any Acadian mountains this visit.

Well, in July I'll be begging for rain, so I refuse to complain about the weather. A wet spring is far better than a dry spring, and a cool spring keeps the crocuses in bloom.

On my walk yesterday I found a slim volume by Annie Ernaux in one of the little free libraries I patronize. Ernaux is a French writer who won the Nobel a couple of years ago, and this particular book, Look at the Lights, My Love, records the visits she made to a sprawling big-box store outside of Paris over the course of a year. It's quite fascinating and it's been refreshing to read alongside the fin-de-siecle densities of Henry James. (I wish this silly blog program would allow me to easily insert French accents where they belong but it remains rigidly Anglophone.)

Today I'll be working with the kids on finishing touches for their final work: prompts involving experiments with titles and punctuation and maybe some performance practice as well . . . kind of difficult over zoom, but I might give it a try anyway. I use a stack of sample poems and prompts to demonstrate the richness of titles, an exercise I've found can be really helpful at this stage of the process. Kids tend to just slap on any old thing as a title; it surprises them to recognize how intensely a title can interact with the body of a poem.

So here's hoping they show up in snowy messy Monson--