mimsy and outgrabe

It's Columbus Day, a holiday for the grade schools, so my non-duty day (Stuffolk's term for the day during the week we don't teach classes) will actually be filled with lots of duties, just not academic ones.  There are a lot of housekeeping details to take care of after our house was ransacked for the boy's 4th birthday party . . . which managed to be a good party for him -- really just one big play-date with his little friends, dressed in their superhero costumes, without a lot of structure but WITH a whole lot of chaos. Somehow, between the herculean efforts of my sister, her boyfriend, and my husband, we managed to get the house ready for the party even though, about two hours before the party was scheduled to begin, we had a major plumbing incident that covered most of the kitchen in debris from the garbage disposal and required dismantling part of the pipes in the basement.  I still don't know how A. managed to keep calm and cool and be persistent an...

I don't have too much to say today. Hormones and my natural dispensation toward craziness have me looney and sad as a motherfu**er, and that doesn't really mix well with all of the work I have to do, both at the office and at home. My boy's 4th Birthday Super Hero Party (this weekend) might be the saddest 4th Birthday Super Hero Party of all time if I don't get my act together. In the meantime, between now and whenever I DO get my act together (and find time to write a real post), here's a really wonderful poem for you to read by my good friend A.P. up on the web site of Cider Press Review.

1. This excellent rumination on Roald Dahl by someone on the Silkworms Ink crew. 2. This article from Beyond The Margins by Jessica Francis Kane about writing while raising children. 3. This poem by Jane Kenyon. And since I'm on a Kenyon kick, this , too. WRITING UPDATE: I'm nearly finished with the first section of the last chapter (Chapter X.i.) of the fairy tale. I spent all day at the library yesterday and managed to tweak two stanzas and write another two. I believe there will be one more before the section's complete. So I'll not have, most likely, the poem finished before the beginning of school. But I'll finish it soon. It's going to take precedence over teaching during the first week, and luckily that's okay, because the first week of school is a pretty easy week. (The second week, especially if I'm preoccupied with the poem, will be the scary week.) Yesterday I received markups from The Southern Review of my poems. Yay! That wond...

It's probably not healthy or wise to think about this, but lately I've been overly concerned with the thought that the next time I get to be a full-time writer will be at the butt-end of this decade. As my colleagues post end-of-semester raves and rants on Facebook, I'm forced to acknowledge that this rare moment is almost over. I am a wee-bit depressed, to say the least. This is a completely ungrateful and sorry-for-myself attitude to have, I realize. I know that I'm ridiculously lucky to have had this opportunity at all. I'm just wallowing in a little bit of post-Thanksgiving, pre-Christmas, pre-final-weeks-of-sabbatical depression, methinks. It's probably time to lay off the caffeine and get back into exercise. I don't have a lot of time left to wallow, after all. Just a few more sweet weeks of writing until I return to teaching. (And really, the teaching I kinda look forward to -- it's the committee meetings and grading that I would rather not deal...

I've had a good writing day. I managed to write for five nearly-solid hours (give or take an interruption or two) -- and I "finished" three stanzas of the fairytale poem. (I feel like the word "finished" should always be in quotation marks when used to talk about the state of one's writing.) Compared to my work over the month of August, that's like fitting three days into one! It's nice to be able to finally appreciate the sabbatical. Days like this would not occur without a semester off from teaching. Or they might occur, but there would be only one -- maybe two -- of these days that actually happened over the course of three or four months. That makes me sad, briefly, and then I shake off the sadness, force myself to remember that the spring semester and my eventual return to teaching is a long way off, and that perhaps my writing life will look somewhat different after having experienced this grace period. Today, that's what the sabbatic...