We did get a rainstorm last night, but now the humidity is back, along with the wildfire smoke, and my sinuses are clogged and complaining.

But first things first: what about those Red Sox? This team has been wretched all year--until, suddenly, they're not. Yesterday's game was their twelfth win in a row, and as entertainment it was perfect . . . every at-bat packed with dramatic tension, and then the romance soaring when Wilyer Abreu, in a 3-2 count, with two outs already in the inning, laced his second home run of the game and put the Sox ahead for good. It was a schmaltzy-movie sort of game, for sure, but I'm sopping up all of the temporary baseball feel-good I can. They'll start losing again soon.

Meanwhile, I caught up on a chunk of yard work before the rain, and then, in the afternoon, I put together initial plans for my fall Poetry Kitchen class, "A Visit with the Brothers Grimm: Using Fairy Tales to Generate and Revise Poems." I love fairy tales, and I've been rereading them regularly since childhood--the Grimm versions, but also Andrew Lang's French-influenced tales, Italo Calvino's Italian collections, and the many other volumes that I've pulled off library shelves over the course of my life. I've long known that fairy-tale logic, structure, surreality, moral ambiguity, class warfare, and so on have affected my work imaginatively and thematically. But I think these elements have also played a role in how I move from raw first drafts into early-stage revisions, and that's what I hope we can play with in the upcoming class.

The dates are November 7 and 8, on Zoom. The cost is $150. There will be lots of off-screen writing time. Maybe I'll see you there.