Transcription of actual text correspondence between Teresa and Dawn, after this weekend's Whitman session

 T: 🔥

D: I cannot wait to spend time with your draft over the next couple of weeks. You are writing so well!

T: OMG I just was thinking about how you and I are going to have so much fun working together on what we’re writing!! I feel we’re figuring out the architecture of the next-poems that have been baffling us. Does that make sense? 

D: Yes!!!

T: It’s so fucking exciting!

D: I feel more energized about my work than I have for a long time 

T: Me, too.

I dearly hope this class is mattering to the actual participants. But it for sure has lit the burner under my own work--almost explosively so--and under Teresa's also. We've now got a two-week gap before the next zoom session takes place, and while the participants are sharing their work and responses among themselves, Teresa and I will be doing the same.

I am so deeply, massively relieved to be in the zone again. Of course I've been writing writing writing for the past month and a half, and of course that essay was real work. But it wasn't creation fire. And now the fire is back.

Today I'll drive up to Harmony to go for a walk with a friend, then slip over to Wellington to spend the night with other friends, then head to Monson on Tuesday for a day with my high schoolers, and then the long drive home, and voting, and catching up on home obligations. I'll be tired. But my heart feels so light now that I've got this big pot on the simmer. I don't mind being tired. I've got a poem.