mimsy and outgrabe

My first post for 2019 is about my third complete micro-sabbatical. It's nothing short of a miracle that it occurred, too, considering that my family traded viruses and recovered from illness for no less than three weeks following New Year's Eve. For real, peeps. It was gruesome. But it's over now (knock wood) and we're moving forward. Kind of. I mean, everyone's sniffly or coughy, but roughly back to our normal schedules. So anyway: micro-sabbatical. It was really micro this year, as I could only spare mornings for the writing. I had to use my afternoons to prep for spring classes. But I kept a log each day inside this blog post, after I worked toward each day's primary project/aim, and here's what happened. Essentially: Day One: Tuesday, Jan. 22: I used my early-morning writing hours to read and also write my micro-sabbatical plan. I am nothing if not last-minute, as the rest of this sentence will prove: after putting the kids on the bus (and do...

Grainy shot of my neighbor's zinnia. And butterfly. In the wake of Micro-Sabbatical Summer 2018, I've kept writing and done some small fine-tooth-comb type edits to poems that I've written this summer -- which happen to number FOURTEEN, if you're curious.  I know, I know, I'm just as shocked as you are.  My workspace in August, feat. coffee, sprinklers, bug spray, knee. I know that for other writers this isn't really a big deal, but I know also that there are some of you who understand this feeling -- this feeling of having been treading water for a really, really, really long time and then finally venturing toward some distant shore. The shore may be really far off in the fucking distance, but you're finally able to swim toward it. Maybe that's a lame and expected metaphor.  But I warned you -- I'm still rusty. Yesterday I met with M.S. and we shared with each other the work we've been attempting to eke out this summer, som...

Friday I received news that yet another of my spring semester classes wasn't going to run because of low enrollment. So for the second time this month I had to change my planned office hours and email the bookstore about textbook orders and do some kind of triage with the little bit of class prep I had managed to do before this point. I suppose the one good thing about being drastically behind in terms of class prep is that you haven't wasted *too* much time when those classes are canceled.  It's generally brighter and less cave-like during the day. In some ways my new teaching schedule is far more simple -- I'm teaching two sections of Intro to Lit, which is usually one of my favorite classes. However, I've always been wary of teaching two sections of anything -- everything feels a little more stale by the second time around. Also, I have to teach three classes back to back on Tuesdays and Thursdays now, which is exhausting and laborious and generally so...

So, the micro-sabbatical was a good idea and totally, wholly worth the planning, effort, work and (some) trouble, but like the best-laid plans, it didn't deliver everything it promised when it was being conceived in my head. For one, you may have noticed -- and been grateful for -- a conspicuous absence of blog posts, right after I'd written something like, "lookout, I'm gonna blow up your feed," or whatever. It turned out that it took me far, far too long to write that first/only blog post of the micro-sabbatical -- like, about two hours -- and that's probably because I haven't written in the blog for a long time and it always takes me a while to get back into the rhythm of the thing, and writing prose. So, when I'd spent a good part of my precious kid-free, solitary-in-the-house time writing about writing the verse play but not actually working on the play itself, I decided that blog posts were not as beneficial when you're working with a h...

Where did Day 1 go, you might ask? Read on. (If you're not asking, see you some other time!) Last semester I managed to carve out time during the morning to read and write, and that was going swimmingly for about, oh, the month of September, until the inevitable grading and committee-work creep took over, and then I didn't write much at all. There were occasional two-hour spans of time during October, November and December as part of a program I organized at Stuffolk through our faculty union -- and these sessions were good and productive, but I spent most of that time sending out submissions or writing things for the college, and not doing any genuine creative work -- or creative work that I found, well, satisfying. And, as you know, that's not great. Particularly if I would like to keep calling myself a writer. But -- in the moments in between papers, or driving from one campus to another for yet another meeting -- I thought back to the last two times I ma...