At daybreak this pair of whitetails was browsing outside my front door, but they've since vanished into the trees, and morning lake life has shifted to birds--red-winged blackbirds flitting from one alder to another, a loud vireo invisible in the trees, a crow stalking across the grass. And now a bullfrog burps.

The air has a chill in it again, and mist drifts across the lake ripples. It will warm up, though, like it did yesterday, when, just before dinner, I managed to find time to slip into the water. The shallows were a patchwork of warm and cool, late-day sunlight sliding toward the horizon. A party barge bristling with fishing rods chugged past.

The teaching day went well, I think. I started off by dictating Ruth Stone's "Don't Miss It" and immediately gave a writing prompt. Then we moved into a reading of Rilke's "Imaginary Career," followed by another prompt. Both of these prompts were framed around the structures of the example poems, which allowed us to then shift back into conversation about both the models and the participants' new drafts, focusing on transformations within formal choice. That took up the morning, and then the afternoon shifted to small groups who were creating a series of nested questions that led directly into a writing prompt. Teresa closed the day by introducing her afternoon writing projects, which will center around Ovid's Metamorphoses.

This morning I'm mostly off the hot seat as Gwynnie and Gretchen will take over with dance and theater exercises. But tonight is our first performance from Monson, Maine, USA, so the nerves will reignite. We'll be starting with "Slate," the section we presented during our residency in Sarasota, and the new sections will roll out tomorrow and Thursday.