I’ve cut a swathe through the life of a historical figure, written an almost 200 page draft I’m sending to my writing group and Peter to see if the narrative running through make sense. The poems are honed down and have some good imagery, but I’ll want to know which images might be toned down or tossed, and which developed. While the manuscript is ( Read more... )

My poems begin with people who did something that made me stop, frozen with hard-beating heart, the way I did as a child playing Statues after a friend grabbed my hand and spun me around.

Then there’s the wandering through libraries, collecting armloads of books about that person, the places where she lived, the company she kept, her moment in ( Read more... )

Not that I have much familiarity with good housekeeping, something I expect I’ve recorded too much here, but what sometimes gets me through chores is being able to fill a vase with flowers at the end. I like the last touches. The neat-at-last stacks, the fluffed-for-once pillows, the afghan in its place are fun to arrange, like tending to details ( Read more... )

I usually count myself among the world’s slowest writers. I gaze long and closely at scenes, and when I move on, it’s at a meandering, a word I prefer to sluggish, pace. I was once a shy girl in the back row taking note of daredevils and drama queens, though they weren’t called that then, and I continue to be more about long-looking than plunging ( Read more... )

Even when I write prose, most of my writing starts with stray words and phrases that slowly shape into sentences. I visualize, with fuzzy edges, much of what I want to say, then later stalk verbs and objects to make the mess make sense. When I write poetry, it’s satisfying to see words line up. Then stanzas look like stanzas. I love the moment when ( Read more... )

 
Last night the sound of one pet or another woke me with the thought that the character in my work-in-progress sees the world in metaphor. At the moment this seemed revelatory, as such broken-sleep thoughts can sound. But this morning I’m unimpressed with my night mind. What metaphors, I want to know. Can you give me even one example?

Nope.

So, onto ( Read more... )

Sleet is falling over evergreens drooping with snow and ice. I’m revising a manuscript that looks pretty familiar, which isn’t surprising since I looked at it yesterday. And the day before. And the day before that and .. you get the picture. The dripping outside the window is getting way too loud.

Part of me wants to flee from my laptop. I have ( Read more... )

Sometimes writing can feel as carefree as building sand castles ( Read more... )

When I scoop my laptop from the breakfast table, fix another cup of tea, and tell my husband I’m going to work on some poems, sometimes it feels like that. A chore. A job. Hard ( Read more... )

This month there’s a lot of snow, and worse, ice, here in Massachusetts. I think gardening books may sell more now than at any other time of year, though I haven’t researched that. We mark our calendars for the bulb shows promised at local colleges coming not quite soon enough, where the air is fragrant with green leaves and blossoms that make ( Read more... )