Good morning, and so sorry for missing yesterday's post, but I slightly overslept so didn't have time to linger.

The snow is thick up north, but the skies are brilliant blue, and the sun, rising up over the woods, is vivid. Conversation by the wood stove turns to garden and greenhouse. Firewood piles are dwindling, as are winter supplies of onions, garlic, potatoes. But deer steaks sizzle in the pan, blueberry crisp bubbles in the oven, talk skitters back to childhood. And at bedtime, in a stovepipe-heated room, I press my face against the open window and breathe in the dense oxygen of the homeland.

Now here I sit, in my small house by the bay. Once upon a time, I thought I had left the homeland completely, that I was adrift, but now I see that I have simply slipped my canoe into another watershed. The dark inland rivers are also the tidal rivers that flow to the sea. These places are not separate. The long fingers of the rivers curl me back into the woods, release me back toward the gulf. I travel them, as people have always traveled these life-routes. The great names of the great rivers--Kennebec, Penobscot--are the names of the people who loved them.

This place, Maine. Last night, my friend said she'd read somewhere a claim along these lines: "You're a real Mainer if you arrived here once and then never left." Okay then, we all said. We came when we were young. We stuck it out--the cold, the loneliness, the weary work. And here we are. We count.

Well, surprise, surprise: here I still am in Portland. I fully expected to be blinkily driving up a dark gravel road at this very moment, but the Covid gods descended upon the school where I was supposed to be working, and my visiting-artist stint was abruptly postponed till March.

So I didn't exactly get a day off, as I had to edit all day instead of driving for half of it, but I did get another night at home in my own bed.

The other good news is that I think (maybe, possibly) I have finally won the deeply stupid insurance company fight that I have been waging for two weeks. Do they create these scenarios on purpose so that customers just give up and pay? I'm not a conspiracy theorist as a rule, but jeez. For two weeks I've been explaining to one customer-service representative after another that (1) my doctor is in their network (he appears on their own damn web page as a recommended provider) and (2) the bills they are trying to make me pay are for preventative care (annual physical, vaccines, routine mammogram) clearly covered by my plan. Yes, yes, say the voices on the phone. And then I get re-billed. It's so dumb.

But maybe the ordeal is over. Maybe I can finally think of something else besides strangling corporate incompetents. This morning, on my unexpected day off from teaching, I'll go for a walk, eat some oatmeal, and then reimmerse myself in my big editing project. Midafternoon I'll drive north to Wellington, and then tomorrow I'll be in Monson with my usual students. It will be the first day of the big revision hootenanny I've been plotting out for them. Always it's a giant question with young writers (and with older apprentice writers too): how can I teach them to find their own paths into revision; to see revision as an absorbing activity, one that's just as interesting as generative writing; to look clearly but not judgmentally at their various drafts?

The great thing about my class structure is that I have a ton of time to experiment with this process. Basically, I'm going to begin by breaking down the activity into three separate class sessions: (1) revising a draft they think they like, (2) revising a draft they think they don't like, (3) revising a draft they are puzzled by. Tomorrow we'll be considering approach 1: working with a draft they like, maybe one they think is so good that it doesn't need any revision at all, maybe one that they're resistant to messing around with. But they will be messing around with it.  Or, in a more sweet-tongued formulation, we'll spend the whole day celebrating what they do well and then doing more of it.

This week I am back at the mill: Monday starts with a morning of editing and fighting with the insurance company, then driving all afternoon, an overnight up north, then on the road Tuesday at dawn for an all-day high school gig. And that's just the beginning.

Yesterday was my breather, and I tried to make the most of it. I did walk, I did read, I did nap. I made a big Sunday dinner, filled with vegetables and comfort. I settled my thoughts and hung out with my sweetheart.  So this morning I feel pretty good: rested but not sluggish and more or less ready for the showdown.

Tomorrow morning will be cramped, so don't worry if you don't hear from me till Wednesday. 

Yesterday's class was fun: also hard work. I ended up with 12 pages of new writing from the prompts that Teresa and I cooked up around notions of personification, synesthesia, bibliomancy, and an old learn-to-speak-Esperanto schoolbook. I hope the participants' notebooks are equivalently fat and that they're excited by what they've uncovered.

Tomorrow I'll be on the road again, away from home for two nights so I can teach a day in Milo and another in Monson. Then working at home for a couple of days, and then on the road again, to Vermont and a weekend of family matters.

So today is my only day off for quite a while, and I intend to treat it as such. A walk, a movie, a nap . . . who knows what comfortable unexciting adventures lie ahead? I eagerly await them. Of course I won't laze around every second. I've been dipping into Hermione Lee's biography of Virginia Woolf. I need to spend time with my friend Betsy's poem draft. I need to go to the grocery store and I need to do some laundry. I'll make Sunday dinner: probably oven-fried chicken alongside a fennel and cherry tomato salad, maybe mashed potatoes with garlic and parsley, and then fresh raspberry sorbet for dessert.

But I'll get started slowly.

Sunlight is streaking the houses now, and above them the sky is as blue as baby's shirt.

I am tired, and I have worries that I am slotting away into rational pigeonholes. This is necessary and useful and allows me to go on, but the effort adds to the weariness. It can be hard to be sensible, hard to be reasonable, hard to be patient. You know what I mean.

Still, the sky is as blue as a baby's shirt, fresh from the drawer, smelling of trees and wind. 

I thought I might get the chance to sleep in a bit this morning, but no. My internal alarm went off, my cat alarm went off, and here I am, upright and awake and listening to the washing machine churn.

Today Teresa and I are leading an all-day zoom reunion for 2023 teaching conference participants, where we'll be focusing on the notion of chance encounters as a prompt for new writing. I'll tell you more about the concept tomorrow so as not to spoil the surprise for any participants who might be reading this blog. But I will say that we had a lot of fun putting it together, and I hope it turns out to be as entertaining as we hope.

Yesterday was a day of walking--not a bad thing before a day of zoom-chair. First, after breakfast, I walked to Gretchen's house to drink magnificent coffee and start planning our June class together, which will be an amalgam of improvisational theater and improvisational poems. It's always so fun to work with a teaching artist who focuses on a different art form from my own. Plus, Gretchen is 100 percent lovable.

Then I slammed out some housework and a bit of editing before I went on a long walk with my neighbor, also very enjoyable, as she's a sharp-eyed lawyer and I always learn something I never knew before and she has the fun of laughing at me when I get overheated about stupid men and Taylor Swift.

The temperature was 40 degrees, I glimpsed snowdrops in a nearby yard, and then I came home and made borscht and Ethiopian injera and a big salad, the sort of meal that feels like I'm actively saving my life. As I eat, I can feel the nourishment spreading through my body: the sweet-sour heat of the beet soup, the dark moist circles of bread, the kiss of olive oil and greens. Surely, a bowl of borscht solves all ills.

So I'll pause here, in my couch corner, for a few moments this morning, and remember the goodness of food, the goodness of walking, the goodness of easy chatter--oh, these sturdy joys of the earth. And then I'll heave myself into action: a shower, a quick stroll around the block, a load of laundry, a dish of oatmeal; papers gathered, thoughts realigned; then the dive into my workday, poems and poems and poems, with leftover borscht to look forward to at lunch.

It's warmer than it's been: 32 degrees and dripping at 5 a.m. The cat rushed out into the darkness, then rushed back in five minutes later, but at least he had a small airing. He does hate winter. You couldn't pay that pet to run away from home.

It's trash day in the neighborhood, and I need to get off the couch and start emptying bins and lugging compost. It's sheet-washing day in the household, downstairs-vacuuming-and-mopping day, and I'll get to all of it, I'll get to all of it, but for a few more minutes I'm going to sit here with my coffee, staring down at the fat biography of Virginia Woolf, at the letters of Jane Carlyle, at a half-done crossword puzzle and a stack of half-read New Yorkers, the history of Cabeza de Vaca's journey, an atlas of the Gulf of Maine . . . the litter of our reading lives.

Later this morning, after I muscle through a batch of housework and my exercises, I'll walk over to my friend Gretchen's house so that we can start sketching out a class we'll be teaching together in June. Eventually I'll do some editing; but, given my long teaching day tomorrow, I hope I can snag a bit of time for myself today, time that isn't just housecleaning or cooking or hanging laundry. I've got notebook blurts to transcribe, new drafts to beetle into, books to read, the violin to practice: the other face of work, the private chores, the work that affects no one but myself.

It takes a lot of energy to be a poet, to keep stuffing words into the crevices of my quotidian duties. Sometimes I wonder how long I can keep this up. Maybe one day I'll fade into watching Hallmark movies and cat videos; the days of poetry will be over; I will learn a different life. I find this hard to imagine, but the future is a murky trail.

The morning is wintry and dark--freezing fog a-glimmer under the streetlights, snowpack crusted like sugar. It's Thursday, another work day in my endless week of work days: editing, then housework, then this evening I'll go out to write. I would have been happy to stay in bed a bit longer, to burrow back into my blurry dreams about circus tricks and sunscreen. But here I am, awake, sipping my black coffee, learning to be upright again, listening to the sighs of a yawning house.

I've been rereading Woolf's last novel, Between the Acts, which is so extraordinary, so filled with light and wry affection, though her own life was smothering in shadow. I went out last night to watch 42nd Street, a pre-code musical featuring a very young Ginger Rogers in a supporting role, starring Ruby Keeler and Dick Powell, packed with a strange mixture of Depression-era desperation and lavish, bizarrely filmed chorus lines, as if "We have no money, but forty pairs of legs will save us." I got a haircut and felt like it might, in fact, save me--which is the mystery of haircuts, the clean bounce over the brow, the sudden optimism that arises: "ah, now everything is better!"

And now, this morning, I am thinking of a long walk, I am thinking of clean laundry, I am thinking of a notebook and a teacup and my new desk, gleaming with paint and varnish. I am thinking of my brisk body, still holding up after all these years, and I am trying very, very hard to not fear the unknown.

And, now on another note: Hey, you should come to Monson, Maine, this summer! Spaces are filling in the Conference for Poetry and Learning; new people and familiar people are already signing up. It is such a lovely site, and Teresa and I are plotting and planning for a magnificent week, and we want you to be there. Interestingly, I've only received one scholarship application thus far. So if you are hesitating because of money matters, please be in touch. I think I can solve that problem.