mimsy and outgrabe

And just when I thought I'd finished the Fabulous Beast: Poems manuscript, another poem appeared Monday. It was rather startling -- I was saying (to anyone who would listen) that there might be one more myth poem in the collection, but I thought that was just something you say to make yourself feel better about inspiration running out. Apparently, daylight savings knocked a poem loose from the tight, confused knot that is my brain (when it threw every other part of my life off kilter). So I'm not complaining about the loss of an hour -- although trying to get the kids adjusted to the new schedule is a test of my fortitude, to say the least. A.P. and I met on Monday, too, to discuss his excellent new poems and the order of poems in my MS. I'm not sure he got anything out of it (basically I just babbled about how good his new poems are and drew hearts and checks all over the pages . . . because I'm a thirteen year old girl ), but his feedback about my work was reall...

I'm super-tired at the moment, but fairly content. This has been a rough week, with a lot of changes occurring during a very small time frame at work. I wasn't really expecting this to happen -- in fact, I was striving to have a calm, non-interesting semester in terms of teaching and commitments at the college, but once again I've completely abandoned my previous notions and expectations in order to thoroughly embrace something new and exciting but also potentially disastrous! 'Cause, apparently, that's how I roll. I took on a temporary administrative position at the college that will, hopefully, help out my department and also be a good fit for me in terms of easing back into teaching and working full-time. The colleagues I've asked for advice are evenly divided as to whether this will actually happen. Some think that the job will allow me to accomplish more when I'm physically at work, so that when I return home I can emotionally/mentally "be...

This week, Bernadette Geyer and Molly Spencer both blogged about being a parent who writes . . . or being a writer who raises children . . . I'm sure we could get into a semantic argument about which designation is more appropriate, or should be more appropriate, but I don't have time . . . I have to write before the kids get up! (Har, har, har . . . crash of symbols/cricket chirps.) I've been wanting to post something here for a while, but life/children/school and yes, my writing got in the way, and that's something Spencer speaks to in her blog post , which is kind of an answer or addendum to what Geyer posted over at She Writes . I was really, really sick last week -- not deathly so (as my tired joke about the plague would have you think), but enough to make everything other than the most basic tasks seem terribly unimportant. Even still, because I'm neurotic whether or not I'm infected with some savage virus, I woke up early every morning to write and...

I've been quiet for the past few days. (On here, that is. It's almost impossible for me to be quiet in real life.) (Shut up, A.P.) A.P. and I postponed Poetry Friday until Monday because I was having a little Pre-Semester Freakout, and then we moved our meeting until next week because we realized how futile it would be to speak about poetry when the large, ugly shadow of course outlines and class prep loomed over our heads. And thus, once again, writing took a back seat to teaching responsibilities. But, as Vonnegut would say, so it goes . . . some times you just have to put away the poems and focus instead on the paragraph about not texting or surfing the web in class, because that paragraph is what pays the bills. (Sort of. Not just that paragraph, but you get my drift, right?) My problem this week ended up being that I didn't put away the poem. For me, this is a good problem to have -- I'm truly not going to beat myself up too much for writing. But it made the ...

The week will end on a stronger note than it began. I've managed to finish one revision of an old poem that actually has a place in the new manuscript -- in the myth section -- and this morning I found a scrap in my old journal that made its way into being an actual poem for the fable (pig poems!) section. Of course, time will be the real test and may prove that these pieces don't belong anywhere near the MS -- the sow poem in particular, since I'd considered that section pretty much finished. But right now I'm optimistic, which is nice change from the beginning of the week and my last post, eh? The 27th of October is mid-semester at the college, ( and my sister's birthday!) which will mean that my sabbatical will be halfway over at the beginning of November. If I'd kept to the original schedule I set out for myself, the MS would have been complete in September and I'd be immersed in writing my play right now. I can't tell if my efforts to write par...