mimsy and outgrabe

This is something that my lovely therapist M. (former, since I'm a chump and can't carve out time to see someone right now) used to say to me when I sat in her cozy office and threw up (metaphorically) all of the many many many things that stressed me out and caused me to be a frenetic ball of panic and catastrophe. She would wait for a pause in my litany of "blah blah blah stress blah blah blah work blah blah blah kids" and then say something to the effect of, "You just have too many good things vying for your attention right now."  She was really adept at reminding me, gently, to be appreciative of my good fortune. As I write that paragraph above, too, I'm conscious of the fact that to have anyone vying for my attention makes me lucky; I could be alone, really alone. Not in a comfortable, peaceful, solitary way of being alone -- like my mornings, when I write (or, unfortunately, as of late -- grade). But the aloneness that feels closed, without ...

At the end of last week I attempted to create a small writing group that will meet once a week during the summer -- to do NOTHING but write. No workshops, no craft talk, just gathering in the semi-comfortable chairs of the local library for three hours, away from the messy houses and the kids and the talking spouses, and attempting to get words on a page on a regular basis. Everyone was in, excited, ready-to-go . . . and then no one could meet this Wednesday. (Including myself, because I fell ill YET AGAIN (read: another/thesamethatwon'tgoaway stupid sinus infection) and had to ply my system with antibiotics.) 1) I am falling apart. 2) I fear this is a sign of things to come. Both my falling apart (more), and the inability of the writing group to get together. Still, we'll see.  On Tuesday I saw an amazing reading of an equally amazing play by Boo Killebrew, this year's winner of the Leah Ryan's Fund for Emerging Women Writers. The acting was incredibl...

On Friday I finally met with A.P., after what seemed like an eternity, to discuss poetry, and more specifically, our poems. Really, I should say that we met to discuss our poems, and that a more general discussion of poetry developed from our responses to those poems. I have other friends who write poetry who, in turn, have other friends who write poetry also and with whom they conduct weekly or bi-weekly or monthly or yearly workshops. There was an article in Poets & Writers (this month's issue) about the importance of writing groups, but I'm sure most people missed it because this was also the issue in which they posted the oh-so-controversial MFA Program rankings . (By the way, the editorial in Slate that I've just linked to is about as bogus as the rankings themselves -- enjoy!) Anyway, W(here)TF was I? Ah, yes. The column in Poets and Writers by Ann Napolitano was a nice account of how the novelist has continued to maintain her friendship and writing relat...