The Year of Poetry?

 2022 was supposed to be The Year of Poetry.

My actual stated goal for the year - oh, how I love stating goals for each year! - was "Reconnect with and Recommit to Creative Joy." But the biggest part of this was going to be immersing myself in poetry, because what could be more creatively joyous than that? I would read poetry, write poetry, and (gasp!) start submitting my poems for publication. And I would open the year by taking myself to Paris, because what better place to write poetry than in Paris?

I did take myself to Paris in January, but I wrote more blog posts and journal entries than poems while I was there, and also worked on revisions of a middle-grade novel. In February, however, I luxuriated in the online Poem-a-Day group run by brilliant and beloved poet Molly Fisk, and I forced myself to submit just a few poems to just a few places. And two of them got accepted by the Sunlight Press - and they even agreed to pay me money for them. Actual money for being a poet!!! 

But then in March, I got . . . distracted. Instead of falling ever more deeply in love with poetry, I fell in love... with a man. Who fell in love with me. And then all I cared about for the rest of the year, pretty much, was making a new life with him - though I have to say that nobody on earth could be more supportive of me as a writer than he has been. 

I did keep on writing poetry - mainly love poems to him, of course. And I also (mostly) honored my life-long hour-a-day commitment to write (see the name of this blog!) and am close to finishing a full draft of another middle-grade novel which may be my magnus opus or may be an unpublishable dud. Who knows? Who cares? I wrote it with such joy that I can report that for the first time in my writing life I truly cared more about the process than the product. Being so deeply in love has proved transformative for me in many ways!

I did Molly's Poem-a-Day group again in June and also in October - what a remarkable community of poets she has created and nourished! I  also did a ZOOM each month with my friend Jacqueline Jules, a well-published poet whose poems I adore. In each session we critique three poems by each of us - what an insightful and encouraging critic she is!

What I did NOT do was continue to submit poems. It just seemed like so much trouble, so much bother. Wasn't writing them enough? Wasn't it enough just to put words on paper, share them with my new true love, and with Jackie, and with the Poem-a-Day folks? Well, yes. But to be a writer, for better or worse, is to want to connect with readers. And publication - I might as well admit it - is just so satisfying!

So I'm pleased to report that those two poems accepted by Sunlight Press back in the spring are now published - TODAY! Here's the link should you care to take a peek. Maybe 2023 will be the year when I get really serious about not only writing but publishing poetry - could there be a chapbook in my future? But today I'm just happy that both love AND poetry have been part of my life in 2022.

Logging "Nice Things and Accomplishments"

Happy first day of October! For those of you who, like me, start a new life on the first day of every new month, happy new life!

In my trusty little notebook, I keep a log for each month of its "nice things and accomplishments," so I won't look back at the end of the month and wail, "In this whole entire month, I did NOTHING AT ALL!" I'm both reasonably lax and reasonably strict as to what counts as either a nice thing or an accomplishment. So nice as it is, I wouldn't include a pleasant lunch with a good friend whom I see on a regular basis, but I would include a glorious extended visit from a friend from out of town. In the category of accomplishments, I wouldn't include writing individual blog posts, but I did include the blog post series back in January from my trip to Paris. I have standards here, folks!

Usually I end up with 7 or 8 items. January (month of the trip to Paris and its aftermath), I had a whopping 14. For February, I had only 5. But last month I had the most paltry total EVER: a mere three things. 1) I wrote a long-overdue substantive book review for the Children's Literature Association Quarterly. 2) I made steady happy progress on my new middle-grade-novel-in-progress, with 100 pages done of the first draft. And 3) I had a perfectly beautiful first full month with my True Love at Rainbow's End where we deepened our already deep love and strengthened our already strong relationship - oh, and I started a practice of journaling about this every day - which I guess I could count as item number 4. 

Item #2 could have been broken down into giving myself credit for each individual chapter I wrote, but the chapters are short and still feel so tentative and provisional, as if any one of them might be tossed out completely - nay, as if the whole project might be tossed out completely, And, as I just noted, #3 could count as two things - the beautiful happy month AND the faithful journaling about it. But...now that I think of it, is having a beautiful happy month itself a THING? Is it thing-like enough to BE a THING? Or is it just how my life is now? And I hope, how my life will be forever? Or at least for a good long while?

I have to confess that in the grip of this new love, I'm losing my mania for cataloging things. I even - gasp! - took off my Fitbit, for good, two days ago. Once I returned from the morning walk with David and Gaia-the-dog, I realized I had left it in the charger overnight and was getting credit for NONE of those steps, which at first threw me into the usual despair, for isn't any walk pointless if the steps aren't duly calculated? And then I realized.. um... no... because... there was the beauty of the misty morning on Valley Lane... and his hand in mine.

So, while I still think a monthly log of nice things and accomplishments has much to recommend it, as a hedge against underestimating our own productivity, I'm coming around to the view that if I can write on each month's list 1) FATHOMS DEEP IN LOVE and 2) OVERCOME WITH HAPPINESS, that might be enough (though I hasten to add that I did already log for October receipt of book royalties that were larger than I expected and a well-received talk via ZOOM for a literary organization). 

But these days "being" satisfies me (almost?) as much as "doing" - even if I'm glad I wrote this blog post now and can cross it off my to-do list for October!

Helpful Hint for Writers from Sir Isaac Newton; or The Magic of Momentum

As I was working fitfully on my current middle-grade-novel-in-progress during the first part of the summer, I experienced a curious lack of energy, even though I was excited by the idea in theory. But in practice, I just couldn't get into that blissful state of flow where one word follows another onto the page, and one page follows another into a growing stack of chapters. 

Why was this?

Was it because the idea in fact did NOT excite me that much? Was this a signal to me from the Muses to search for another idea that might prove more compelling?

Or was it because I was in fact only sitting down to work on the book for an hour or two every week or two?

I decided to try out the theory that the answer was: the latter. I vowed to MAKE myself sit down to my clipboard, pad, and pen for an hour every single day, and guess what happened when I did?

Yes, I fell in love with the book, and I now have 13 chapters done, and I look forward every day to another hour of being in the company of these characters and watching their story unfold. It turns out that writing really does go better when you actually do it! Who knew??!

Well, Sir Isaac Newton knew. 

Newton's very first law of motion is the law of inertia, that an object at rest tends to remain at rest and an object in motion tends to remain in motion, unless some external force acts upon them. I had been an object at rest. Of course, I tended to remain at rest! I might have remained at rest for the rest of my life and never written anything ever again. But once I decided to make my new resolution serve as the external force to act upon myself - glory be! - I became an object in motion and I've been in motion ever since.

Take today, for example. Our recent heat wave has broken, and it's downright chilly here at Rainbow's End, with a high in the mid-50s and gray misty skies: perfect writing weather. So I got cozy in the sunroom on this day without sun, with Gaia-the-dog standing guard to make sure I didn't waver in my resolve, and I prepared to write.

I had been balking on Chapter 14 because I had no idea what should happen in it  - a good reason to balk! Plus, I had the uncomfortable sense that the pacing of the book was beginning to lag, flag, and drag, not to mention sag. There is a reason why "the sagging middle" is a thing that all writers dread. But, as they say, "the only way out is through." The only way to figure out what needed to happen next was to sit there, pen in hand, and scribble little notes to myself. What ELSE could be going on in my character Zeke's life that might come into play at this point? I brainstormed. I got discouraged. I brainstormed some more. I was still stuck.

Then I realized that what I needed to do was make a calendar for the book of all that had happened so far. To do this is, of course, to realize that one has created weeks with six or seven school days in a row, and a story that begins in mid-February but really needs to begin in late March, etc. etc. That in itself was a highly valuable way to spend a writing hour, as timeline problems are a beast to fix later on. Best, in the course of making the calendar and looking closely at everything that had already occurred, I achieved new clarity on what should happen next. I now have a plan!

Yay for being an object in motion! Yay for the magic of momentum!

P.S. As I downloaded a Sir Isaac Newton stock photo to use in this post, I saw that I already had one saved on my computer. Hmm. I must have blogged about Newton's first law of motion at some time in the past. I Googled myself, and sure enough, I had, back in 2018! But this current post reflects on inertia from a different angle, so I'm glad I wrote that old one and was quite interested to read it as I had forgotten it even existed; now my present and future self can benefit from the wisdom of my past self. And I'm glad I wrote this one, too, for future me to read. And maybe for some of you! 

The Newest New Life Ever

It's the first day of the new month, so the day I start (as I always do on the first of every month) a WHOLE ENTIRE NEW LIFE. But this one feels like the newest new life EVER.

In March I fell in love - desperately, hopelessly, till-death-do-us-part in love. By May he and I were fathoms deep in this, going happily back and forth between my home in South Boulder and his gorgeous apartment on West Pearl Street in Boulder, nestled at the foot of the mountains but in easy walking distance from the coffee shops and bookstores of our famed car-free downtown shopping area. The drive from one to the other was a mere 12 minutes. It was all absolutely perfect for new love to take root and grow toward the sun.

But in May he found out his lease wasn't being renewed... and he had to move... and we had to throw ourselves into house-hunting in a tight and tense real estate market... and ponder what our future together would look like now. He made a list of what he was searching for in a rental and came up with these criteria: not more than 20 minutes away from Claudia's house, fenced yard for his beloved German shepherd, and no stairs as a wise choice for the two of us as we age. 

Instead we both fell in love with a place with NONE of these features: far enough away from my house that the drive back and forth would be much less convenient, no yard at all, and stairs, stairs, and STAIRS!

He moved in at the start of August to this house in the near mountains, and now I'm pretty much here all the time, because it is SOOOO beautiful! It is the perfect place to be in love! AND the perfect place to write! And just.... perfect. The owner even gave it the name of Rainbow's End. What could be more perfect that that?

So here I am, trying to figure out how to be BOTH a woman who loves this man AND a woman who loves to write. My old routines are no longer working, so I'm groping toward new ones.

Old routine for the last few years:

Wake up at 3:30 a.m., decide that getting up at that hour is much too ridiculous, so stay in bed till 3:45 (which after all is the same as quarter to 4, a perfectly respectable time to get up), write for a blissful hour, piddle on my phone with Wordle and Duolingo for a while, leave at 5:50 to meet a friend for a walk by the lake, home by 7:30, with so much already accomplished that I am downright giddy with smugness and pity for others' slothfulness. 

Recent routine as a new lovebird:

Wake up at 5:30, cuddle in bed with my beloved till 6:30 or 7, sharing and analyzing our dreams and marveling that we could love anybody as much as we love each other, then long walk on a deserted lane tucked into a Ponderosa pine forest with Gaia-the-dog, back home by 8 or so, sit for an hour on the deck with coffee for him and hot chocolate for me, then stretching for him while I dally on my phone with games and our oatmeal slowly cooks, eat the oatmeal in a long leisurely breakfast on the other deck that ends at 11:00 - and OMG, the whole morning is gone and I have accomplished nothing!!! Nothing at all!!!

New routine for the new life:

Same as the lovebird routine, BUT with a dedicated hour-a-day of writing (timed with my hourglass) during part of the coffee-on-the-deck time and all the rest of the pre-breakfast time, with no time-wasting indulgences on my phone until after this is done, and then sweet reunion over the now well-earned oatmeal. I started this new regimen three days ago, on this past Monday; it's Thursday now, and I can report that I'm so much happier (despite having been extravagantly happy before). I'm a quarter or third of the way into a new middle-grade novel in progress that I adore - more on this to come. I finally have the momentum that comes from faithful, sustained commitment to a project.

Can I have love AND writing, too? On this first day of my newest new life ever, my answer is ... I think so?

New Month, New Life

For many years, I had the practice of starting a new life on the first day of each month. It's too daunting to start a whole entire new life on some random day partway through some random week; I needed to start a new life on a day of some significance, but not extraordinary significance, or I'd have to languish too long in the old life awaiting this rare fateful moment. So the first day of each month proved to be just right. 

A new life meant: eating better! exercising more! no Sudoku puzzles on the I-pad! And most of all: making good on my commitment to write for an hour each day. Alas, the new life invariably petered out partway through the month, but I truly believe I owe everything I've ever achieved to my willingness to start my life anew on a regular basis.

Lately, EVERYTHING else in my life has petered out ever since I met MY TRUE LOVE (see previous post!). He, too, has neglected many things in his own life as well, consumed as we both are with this miracle the universe has sent our way. We both agreed that this was all right. After all, how many times does anybody have a chance to luxuriate in the intoxication of a new romance? 

But now, two and a half months in, it does seem as if it we might consider giving some attention to those things that had once given our lives meaning and were now quietly whimpering from our neglect. For me, chief among these is writing.

So today I took my beloved hourglass to David's apartment and set it on a stool by his fireplace. (Among his many other gifts, he is a fabulous fire-builder, from heating a past home entirely by firewood). It was time to return to putting one word after another for  a full sixty minutes.

Oh, and among his many other gifts, he is a fabulous bread baker who just celebrated his fiftieth anniversary of baking all of his family's bread, so while I was writing, he was baking. Bliss!

I wrote a couple of pages on what is sort of a work-in-progress, or would be if I had been doing any work on it so that it could have any progress. But today I did. And I even sort of liked the pages. And the only way to produce pages I DO like is to slog through scribbling pages I DON'T like, so it's good either way. 

 

PLUS, today I signed up for the every-other-month Poem-a-Day online group hosted by brilliant and beloved poet Molly Fisk. I wrote a witty poem entitled "Mrs. Google Map Lady" for the June 1 prompt and posted it to the group, and so far five people have liked it and three people loved it and several wrote comments, too!

PLUS, I wrote this blog post!

And I still love David as much as ever, and he still loves me as much as ever!

So right now I'm loving this month's new life. 

A Many-Splendored Thing

 "It's been over two months since she posted," they say. "Is she ever going to post again?" they wonder. "Has something HAPPENED to her?" they worry.  "Something BIG? Maybe even something . . . HUGE?"

Yes, dear ones. It HAS been over two months since I last posted. And now I AM posting again, and I plan to keep on posting. And, yes, something HAS happened to me. And yes, it's BIG, and yes, it's HUGE - and here's a clue - what happened to me is a MANY-SPLENDORED THING.

I have fallen in love.

I have fallen desperately, hopelessly, till-death-do-us-part in love, with a man who, miraculously, feels exactly the same way about me. 

Almost exactly two months ago, on a night when I was feeling sad and lonely, and depressed about various writing disappointments, and inspired by the recent merriment a friend was having in her foray into online dating, on a whim I signed up for Match.com.

I met him in my first hour on that dating site. 

At first I just got a lame and annoying message of "Hi" from a man who lives in Phoenix (hundreds of miles away) and another of "How are you?" from a man who lives in Grand Junction (many hours' drive from here). But then I got a thoughtful, insightful message from a man who had read my (hastily assembled) profile with great care and identified points of potential commonality between us. And... this man lives right here in Boulder.

I wrote back, he wrote back, I wrote back, and then he suggested a phone call. In that first call, on Thursday, March 10, we talked for two hours. On the next day, we talked for five hours, in two chunks followed by a brief break in between. I was already smitten enough that I canceled Match.com without asking for a partial refund of the $277 I had paid for a year's membership. I had already gotten my money's worth. 

The following day my little granddaughters arrived for their week-long spring break visit, so I knew I'd be fully occupied with them, but all week long he and I had stolen chats and texts during the day and a two-hour  conversation each night after they went to bed.

Then came the fateful day where we would meet for the first time in person. We walked into each other's arms and have barely let go since. 

His name is David. He is a fellow academic/professor (in his case, of economics), one of our first points of commonality, and a brilliant teacher (and I, too, prioritized teaching throughout my academic career). But he was a tough, demanding grader and I was a softie. I'm delighted by all the ways we are alike AND by all the ways we are different. 

We share fundamental values. But in temperament, he is the calmest person I have ever met and the most patient, while neither of those are my gifts. He also does everything slowly and precisely while I do everything quickly and sometimes carelessly. He's an introvert; I'm an extrovert. He is an extremely healthy eater and was appalled by my diet of jellybeans and Cadbury eggs; he is a master spreadsheet maker and was equally appalled by the botched job I do every morning of balancing my checkbook by hand. But we both hate April Fool's Day. And we are both as in love as two people could ever be. 

"What do the two of you do for fun?" a friend asked. Well, mainly we just hold each other and talk, and talk, and talk. After almost a month together, we finally went to a restaurant. After almost two months together, we finally watched a movie on TV. But nothing beats talking our hearts out and holding each other close.

At first, in the throes of this new love, I lost interest in everything else in my life. Why had I ever cared about writing anything but love poems? Why had I ever wanted to share anything I wrote with anybody but him? But it turns out that he is also a wonderful person to talk about writing with... and a wonderful person for brainstorming ideas... and a wonderful person for critiquing a draft... and a wonderful cheerleader for me as writer. So now I AM writing again - so joyously! - and will resume blogging again (promising NOT just to blog about how wonderful this new man is!). Everything is more joyous now because of him.

"I know I'm getting borderline obnoxious about how in love I am," I told another friend recently. Then I had to correct myself. "I guess... not BORDERLINE obnoxious, right?" But she didn't blame me. She knew how sad I've been for so long about so many things. She was willing to let me be obnoxiously happy now.

And I am!

 

Passing the (Writing) Torch to a New Generation

A few weeks ago a small envelope arrived in the mail. The name on the return address was familiar, but I couldn't quite place it; the street was just a few blocks from my home. Hmmm.

I opened to find a card written in exquisitely tiny handwriting, from a girl (now a young woman) who had been my older son's classmate at Mesa Elementary School over two decades ago. She wrote that she still remembered how inspired she had been as a child from a talk I gave on writing to her class. She had recently rekindled her own interest in writing, begun reading my books for young readers, and had been following the Paris posts on my blog. She just wanted me to know that I was continuing to inspire her to follow her writing dreams.

Well! THAT certainly makes up for any number of recent career disappointments!

I wrote her back right away, with a handwritten note of my own, though lacking her meticulous, miniscule printing, and invited her to come for tea. Via email, she accepted the invitation, and last week presented herself at my door, with a shy smile and a Mason jar filled with flowers.

And then we talked, and talked, and talked. I wanted to hear all about her post-Mesa-Elementary life, and she was willing to share it. I poured out all I could think of to tell a young writer starting her journey to an author of children's books. Join SCBWI (the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators). Read editor Cheryl Klein's brilliant book The Magic Words. Make friends with the wonderful owners of our terrific local indie bookstores that support children's book events: Second Star to the Right, Wandering Jellyfish, and BookBar/Bookies. And much, much more.

By the end of our time together I had shared with her some of the challenges of my own work-in-progress, a creative historical-nonfiction picture book, and she (with her multiple degrees in history) ended up being the one to offer ME encouragement. We were peers and colleagues already.

The flowers are a teensy bit wilted now, but still make me happy every time I walk by them. 

I feel like a Wise Old Woman! Or actually, more like a Wise Middle-Aged Woman. Or maybe just a Person Who Has Been Writing Books for a Very Long Time and Has a Big Bunch Insights to Share. 

Of course, I've already had many opportunities to share my children's book wisdom, such as it is, with my students in the Graduate Programs in Children's Literature at Hollins University and with writing mentees through the Michelle Begley Mentor Program. Those have been wonderful experiences, too. But there was something especially poignant about this encounter with a childhood classmate of my son, maybe also because I'm increasingly wondering what the future holds for me as a professional author. This felt particularly like "passing the torch to a new generation."

Fortunately, the beauty of this kind of torch-passing is that you can light someone else's torch without extinguishing your own. It's not so much a passing of the torch but a sharing of the light, where two candles, or ten, or a thousand, or a million, just make the world that much brighter. 

In lighting Sarah's candle, I relit mine, too. Thanks to my delightful time with this new friend, I sent off my nonfiction picture book manuscript to my agent this morning!

Finding Out What DOESN'T Work Is Progress, Too, Right?

So February was a not-so-good month. 

On the plus side: 

I did write a poem every day from a photo-and-text prompt given by brilliant poet/teacher Molly Fisk in an online poetry group she facilitates every other month. I don't think any of my poems were very good, but, hey, I wrote them and forced myself to share them. I faithfully kept this commitment I made to myself.

I also forced myself to submit a batch of older poems somewhere each week. So far I haven't heard from one place, received rejections from two (though one where the editor did note which of the five poems submitted was strongest in his view), and got one acceptance. My poem "Earth and Moon" will be featured on Your Daily Poem for August 12. 

But my other two writing projects for the month led to nothing but failure. 

The first was groping toward writing some kind of thing (middle grade novel? young adult novel? adult memoir?) based on my own turbulent adolescent years during the equally turbulent years of the late 1960s. I have enormous amounts of (in my view) fabulous material that I wrote in junior high and high school, plus such vivid memories. Surely I could turn this into a book somehow?

The second was figuring out how to turn my decades- long fascination with the Lowell mill girls of the first half of the 19th century into the text for a nonfiction picture book. Right now creative nonfiction in picture book form is some of the most exciting work being published for young readers. Surely there was some story here that I could share for this audience?

Or... maybe not. 

Right now, after working steadily for a month on these, I'm worried that both would be chiefly of interest to . . . well . . .  to me. The 1960s project feels like an exercise in middle-aged white woman's nostalgia - not a booming area of children's book publishing at the current moment (and it's children's book publishing which is still dearest to me). The writing I've done on the Lowell mill girls material is so prosy and flat, filled with so much necessary but dense background material - hardly what would appeal to picture book readers.

Sigh.

And sigh.

Thomas Edison famously said, "I have not failed. I've just found 10,00 ways that won't work." 

I guess I can say that February was the month of finding two ways toward publication that aren't going to work for me. 

 I'm not sure, however, whether I've found two projects that aren't going to fly, or merely found two approaches to these projects that aren't quite right. For the 1960s project, maybe I just need to distance myself more from autobiography and work on finding a plot structure stronger than my own life story. For the Lowell mill girls project, maybe I need to find some angle toward the material that will allow for a text that is simpler, more lyrical, and more kid-friendly.

Edison also famously said, "The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time." But did he mean "try one more time to make this project work"? Or "try one more time to find another project that might work better"? 

I don't know. But right my plan for the month of March, which begins today, is going to be to try one more time on both these projects, as both have been dear to my heart for decades and I can't bear yet to let them go.

I will try, try again.

Should I "Do Something" with My Poetry?

One of my writing goals for this year is to take my lifelong love of poetry and to "get serious about it" and "do something with it." 

I loved writing poetry as a child. In my very first book, written at age six, I included an advertisement at the end for a future "big book" of "POWATREE." 

I wrote huge quantities of poetry throughout elementary school, junior high, and high school, many of them love poems to the poor persecuted boy with whom I fell in love on October 17, 1967, such as this one, dated October 3, 1968, the fall of my freshman year of high school:

The leaves are bruised with scarlet,

The sky is seared with blue;

The hills are wrung in purple,

The grass is weeping dew –

To leave with all that agony

They must have loved you, too.

But then, as an adult, I pretty much stopped writing poetry, until I began attending an annual poetry-writing retreat held each January, first in a country inn in the Poconos and then in a convent in New Jersey, where attendees greeted the new year by writing poetry for a glorious weekend under the direction of various guest teachers.

The poet teachers were all wonderful, but the one who influenced me most was Molly Fisk. Molly celebrated sheer creative generativity: making something, sharing something. She enforced a $5 fine if we apologized for our poems before sharing them. She prioritized appreciation over critique, generally receiving each poem read aloud simply with a quiet "Thank you." In the online poetry groups she facilitates, in which I've participated many times since then, she in fact bans critique, or even "helpful suggestions." This has proved an excellent environment for me to flourish as a poet.

Now, however, I'm wondering if I want to try to publish some of my poems... share them not just with a small circle of fellow poets or friends, but with the wider world. But will this spoil the joy I've had in writing poetry just for the sake of writing it? Will this put me back into the trap I recently escaped of breaking my heart over letting myself care too much for writing's external rewards?

The rewards of publishing my poems, were they to come, would be small in any case. The places that would accept my work are almost guaranteed to be publications that pay only in copies (if "copies" there are - most are now online only) and attract a readership that may be only in the single digits. A well-published friend, who has published her own poems in over a hundred different venues, told me to expect, at best, a rejection to acceptance ratio of 15:1. If I should dream of publishing a book of my poems, even the extremely modest dream of selling a hundred copies may be doomed to disappointment.

So: why do this? 

Well, the very smallness of the payoff in terms of fame and fortune would bring some security from being carried away by crass ambition. Though even in Molly's online group, I find myself coveting not only "like" emoticons on what I share, but heart-shaped ones... or even - gasp - a morsel of praise from the lips of Molly herself. I can't seem to get past caring whether somebody else on this earth gives a warm welcome - or an ESPECIALLY warm welcome - to my little poem children. 

In any case, for better or worse, I've decided to do it. I submitted a first batch of poems this past week, and I plan to submit one batch a week for the rest of the year (where these can include poems recycled from previous rejections). And maybe one of these days, I will be a PUBLISHED POET, and that will be a fact I can cherish for the rest of my days. I'll be able to share my PUBLISHE POEM on Facebook! And then fifty of my friends will like it, and some will love it, and maybe some will even choose to share it with others. 

I think I owe this effort toward publication to the POWATREE-dreaming child I was. 

In a month daffodils will start to bloom.... and maybe some of my poems will bloom with them.

Home from Paris: Now What?

I've been home from Paris for a week now, after my pilgrimage there to rekindle creative joy in my writing. First, of course, I had to deal with all that is involved with reentry into one's life after a long time away: recovering from jet lag, facing accumulated LTs (Loathsome Tasks), and giving attention to the dog who had pined for me so mightily during my absence. 

But now it's time to prove myself worthy of Paris by fulfilling the promises I made to myself there.

I don't have any current works-in-progress, so this is going to be the year of creative reinvention. My goal as of this moment is to head in two different directions.

First, I want to get serious about growing as a poet and trying to "do something" with the poems I've been writing for the past decade - and for my whole life really. With this goal in view, I've dragged out craft books I've purchased over the years: The Sounds of Poetry by Robert Pinsky, Structure and Surprise: Engaging Poetic Turns, edited by Michael Theune, Ordinary Genius: A Guide for the Poet Within by Kim Addonizio, and The Poetry Home Repair Manual by Ted Kooser. I've made a stack of  slim books of poetry published by friends and other poets I admire.

I plan to sign up for the Poem-a-Day group that poet Molly Fisk hosts online every month, and to attend an online poetry seminar, and to do a monthly ZOOM with a poet friend to share our work. I will immerse myself in poetry!

My other creative pull is toward immersing myself in the past: to grope toward an autobiographical novel based on my own turbulent adolescence in the turbulent late 1960s - for middle-grade readers? for young-adult readers? for adults? Who knows? I've unearthed the two 100-plus page books I wrote (and typed on an old-fashioned typewriter) while I was in eighth grade. T is for Tarzan is a collection of humorous episodes about various hijinks; Maybe in Heaven is a chronological account of my doomed love for a boy I called Apollo (the Sun God), who (very wisely!) didn't love me back. The title expresses the hope that he might love me back someday... in heaven. 

And, oh, the poems! Shoeboxes full! Many of them love poems to this same greatly persecuted boy.

I have journals, too, filled with so much pain that I have to take a break after reading every few dozen pages, and the start of an autobiographical novel about all of this that I was working on during winter break from my freshman year in college.

The girl I was in those years was so intensely passionate and troubled; she loved so much, and so loudly; she felt so deeply, and shared it so fully. (She cheerfully allowed these ridiculously personal and embarrassing books to be circulated among the entire student body). It's as if she didn't have any skin, but was rubbed raw from how hard - but also how glorious - it was to be alive. So I may try to tell her stories now, enriched by all I've learned about writing and about life in the past half century. 

My younger son's girlfriend sent me a special candle for Christmas, intended for those homesick for France. The label describes its fragrance in this way: 

I'm burning it now.

My Last Day in Paris (for now!)

Yesterday was my last full day in Paris before flying home this afternoon. So of course it had to begin as all last days of international travel must do at this moment: with a COVID test taken any time on the calendar day preceding the day of departure.

Fortunately this was very easy to accomplish here. The pharmacy that is just a block from my hotel sets up a little tent every day for walk-in tests with immediate results.

I was there right when the pharmacy opened at 9, but a short line was already forming. I submitted my identification, paid my 29 euros, had the swab up the nose, and came back in twenty minutes for my results. The document was entirely in French, but the only two things I needed to be able to read on it were my name and the crucial word "NEGATIF"!!! So hooray for that. 

The weather was cold, gray, and gloomy. "But you always say you like this kind of weather best," I reminded myself. Still, I planned an outing full of sparkle as compensation. I have walked everywhere on this trip, partly to avoid the (excellent) Paris Metro system for fear of crowds and also because my favorite part of a trip like this just is the walking. So I set off on an hour-long walk to a museum I had never visited before, the Jacquemart-Andre Museum, which, in the words of the ever-reliable Rick Steves guidebook, "showcases the lavish home of a wealthy art-loving Parisian couple" and their collection of European masters.

I crossed the Seine on the ornate, ostentatious Pont Alexandre III:

When I reached the museum, it was as lovely as I had been told it was. 

There was a Botticelli exhibit upstairs so I sighed in the presence of his beautiful Madonnas. But then I settled myself to write while sitting on the most appealing bench I'd found in any museum so far:

I would like to say that I wrote a poem worthy of the red velvet cushions, or found an idea for the book that will be my career-culminating masterpiece. But I felt a bit shy with its splendor and just wrote in my journal.

The museum's cafe is equally splendid, and I treated myself to lunch there, including selecting a delectable pastry from the dessert case. Most of the other patrons seemed to be French ladies having lunch with other French ladies; I was the only person without a companion, but I was happy to be an American lady having lunch with her journal.

My next stop was less satisfying. Boulevard Hausmann, where the museum is situated, is also the site of Paris's two grand department stores: Galeries Lafayette and Printemps. I had bought a brightly colored tropical plush toy bird there on a trip to Paris back when I was in my 20s, which I then had to lug in a shopping bag on the rest of the European tour. But this time I just found both stores overwhelming. They have now sprawled into adjacent buildings as well, and as I entered I saw so many signs for Prada, Gucci, and Chanel that I knew this was not the place for frumpy, dumpy, dowdy me. Here is the famous rotunda of Galeries Lafayette: 

I will confess that I had visions, when I planned this trip, of returning from Paris completely transformed. Maybe I would change my hair style from the same way I have worn my hair since high school! Maybe I would return chic and stylish, as Audrey Hepburn does in Sabrina. Before her trip to Paris, she is merely the chauffeur's daughter with a hopeless crush on the son of the manor. But upon her return, she is such a stunner that now he is the one smitten. When her father worries that she is still "reaching for the moon," she is able to tell him, "No, Papa. Now the moon is reaching for me."

Well, I slunk away from the Galeries Lafayette sadly sure that the moon will NOT be reaching for me. The only way this transformation could happen would be that I would have to want it much more than I do, spend much more money that I am willing to spend, and most important, have a stylish friend with infinite patience to take me on as a project. 

Oh, well. My true goal had been, not to transform my wardrobe, but to transform my writing. So on this last day of the trip it was time to ask myself: had I achieved that goal? I have to answer: not really. I wrote less than I had planned and mainly focused on children's book projects - what I've always written - instead of something daringly new-for-me. 

But the real goal of the trip hadn't been so much to change who I am as a writer but to recover who I have always been - someone who finds deep joy in the act of writing itself and in being part of a supportive community of other creators. 

And that I did, both as I sat writing in the Louvre, the Musee d'Orsay, the Centre Pompidou, and on a velvet bench in the Jacquemart-Andre, and as I spent three wonderful days with Catherine Stock in Rignac. 

I hereby declare this trip a SUCCESS! Now I just need to get home today despite various logistical challenges that are too boring to talk about. And really, there is no scenario I can imagine on which I don't get back home sooner or later.. and with renewed joy in my heart. 

Au revoir, Paris!

Back to Paris from Southern France with a Grateful Heart

When I am "old and grey and full of sleep, and nodding by the fire" (Yeats), I will still remember these past three days in Rignac with Catherine Stock as some of the sweetest of my long and happy life.

I left in the early morning darkness on Monday to walk for half an hour along the Blvd. Saint Germaine and the banks of the Seine to the Gare d'Austerlitz to catch the train that would take me south for four and a half hours to Brive la Gaillarde where I would change to a smaller train for the shorter ride to the tiny Gramat station in the Lot Department. (I had thought Catherine lived in the Dordogne, but she lives in the adjacent Lot). The train moved so swiftly and smoothly that it hardly felt as if it was moving at all, but it was: first past the graffiti on the walls of outer Paris, then past seemingly endless flat fields already sprouting green fuzz, and then to the rolling hills, copses of trees, and patchwork of small farms of southern France. 

I was a bit nervous on the train as my French is adequate for reading, but not for hearing rapidly delivered announcements, and I had no timetable of stops along the way to help me listen for my own, plus I had no luck at all with wi-fi at any point on my journey away from Paris. But all was well, and Catherine was there to meet my train with her two beautiful and affectionate border collies, Jim-Jam and Babou.

Many people don't know that children's book authors do not choose their own illustrators, nor do they have any official contact with them during the course of the publication of a book. So even though Catherine had illustrated the ten books of my Gus and Grandpa series of early readers (and one earlier chapter book, Melanie Magpie, which we had both forgotten completely about!), she and I had never met in person. But it had been absolutely uncanny that without ever meeting me, or seeing a picture of the real-life grandpa the books were based on (my father-in-law), Catherine's fictional grandpa had a startling resemblance to him. The only difference had been that she gave him a mustache that he lacked in real life - a discrepancy he promptly remedied by growing a mustache of his own to match her wonderful pictures! Once I met her in real life, however, it all made sense, as she is someone able to make compassionate connections with all kinds of people, and she and I are kindred spirits in many ways despite her being vastly more cosmopolitan and adventurous than I am.

Catherine immediately whisked me off to the nearby town of Rocamadour, which she has painted many times with her watercolor students, teaching me to recite, "The town is above the river, and the cathedral is above the town, and the castle is above the cathedral." Rocamadour is said to be the second most visited site in France, after Mont St. Michel, famed for its Black Virgin statue and associated miracles.

It is impossible to see steps like these and not want to climb them - though I was glad not to climb them on my knees as devout pilgrims do!

Catherine's nearby hamlet, Rignac, radiates charm, and her cottage, Le Tramizal, is most charming of all.

The village even had its own tiny charming Christmas village tucked beneath a tree next to the Romanesque church dating to the 1200s.

On the next day, Catherine drove me on extremely narrow roads past one picturesque village to another, with their churches, cloisters, and chateaux, each one contending for the title of "most beautiful village in France." 

Catherine pointed out the farmhouse where poet W. S. Merwin lived (and hosted visits from Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath), the cathedral where the summer opera performances are held, the chateau with the heartbreaking love story, the village square where she had seen a staging of scenes from West Side Story.... paradise heaped upon paradise!

But the best part of the trip wasn't the sightseeing, glorious though it was, or the peace of the Lot after the hustle-bustle of Paris, relaxing though that was. It was the deeper connection with Catherine, as well as the chance to meet her friend, author-illustrator Rachel Isadora, who also migrated to this part of France. I loved feeling part of this global community of book creators, of people who strive to bring even more beauty into this beautiful world through their words and pictures. I loved that Catherine and I had made so many books together that we are both still proud of, and now there we were, together in person, sharing the story of our lives in all their messy complexity. 

And when I returned to Paris yesterday, I loved being back in my sweet little hotel room. How could I have ever thought it was cramped and cheerless? It was warm and welcoming. It was my little Paris home. 

And tomorrow, if I pass my COVID test today, and if neither of my flights is canceled, I will be back in my little Boulder home....

Writing with the Modernists at the Centre Pompidou

Once I made my plan to slip away from Paris for a couple of days, the rain stopped! The skies were gray but nothing wet was falling out of them, and church bells were pealing out joyously to summon the faithful to worship, as I trotted to the Centre Pompidou, for my third day in a row of writing dates with myself at Parisian museums. This is Paris's modern art museum, with a building that is as extravagantly modern as its contents (internet photo - our sky today was not this blue!).

The escalators taking visitors to the permanent collection on the upper floors are on the outside of the building and futuristic-feeling, as if you might be getting ready to be launched into space. 

When you get to the top there are lovely views down to the plaza below, where old and new meet in a strange embrace.

I especially loved the distant views to the iconic sights of Paris: the Eiffel Tower with its soaring spire, Sacre Coeur on the heights of Montmartre. Most of my photos turn out pretty awful, but the Eiffel Tower one pleased me, with the effect of the raindrops on the glass making it seem even more mysteriously beautiful. 

Despite its later opening time (11:00), this was the least crowded of the museums I chose for writing, and I found a perfect bench in a quiet room on the Contemporary floor (which contains the art that is actually more modern, in the sense of recent, than the mid-20th-century art on the Modern floor). I sat facing Untitled 42 by Alain Seches and had my best writing day of the trip so far.

I worked on the characterization-deepening revisions for my second verse novel that I had started musing about in the company of Rembrandt at the Louvre. Now I had to actually make them happen. The bench I was sitting on was long and wide enough that I could spread out the manuscript pages and plan out exactly which poems I needed to add and exactly where they needed to be placed, so that I could capture the full complexity, ambivalence,  and messy confusion of human life that would unfold at this moment in the protagonist's life. When I had built this crucial bridge to the scenes that follow, I had tears in my eyes, I was so deeply moved by my character's dark night of the soul and how she had worked her way through it. I felt the light radiating up from her like the shafts of color stretching upward from the painting facing me. 

Thank you, painting titled Untitled 42!

Best of all, for the last fifteen minutes or so, a young woman - maybe forty years younger than I am - sat herself down on the far end of the same bench and began writing on the lined pages of her bound journal. We didn't speak through our masks or even have a fleeting moment of eye contact. But I felt a kinship with her, a fellow writer, sitting side by side with me, both of us placing one word after another on the page.

I will skip over the part of the day when I somehow inexplicably lost my Denver Art Museum umbrella but purchased a pricey Pompidou Centre umbrella to replace it. A cafe on the museum plaza was three-quarters empty, so I had a mediocre quiche Lorraine for a late lunch there, with a small glass of wine (what one does in Paris!) while reading the exquisite and heartbreaking poems in my poet friend Ruth Bavetta's gorgeous collection, No Longer at This Address. Step one toward writing better poetry is to read a lot of truly wonderful poems of the sort you aspire to create.

With the sun beginning to peek out, I walked to the Pont Neuf to give my regards to the statue of Henri IV, who offers guidance to Betsy Ray in the Betsy-Tacy series of Maud Hart Lovelace, the books I love best in the whole world, when she is on a trip to Europe - also all by herself - in 1914, on the eve of the first World War. The advice he gave me today was just an echo of the advice I had already given myself: You love writing, so keep on doing it!

As pale sunshine filtered through the clouds, I decided that I might as well make the long walk to the Eiffel Tower. I had told myself that the good of this being my fifth trip to Paris was that I didn't need to "see the sights" in a dutiful way. But after spying the Eiffel Tower through the rain-spattered windows of the Pompidou Centre, it was beckoning to me. Like the mountain peaks I remember from hiking trips in the early years of my marriage, you walk and walk toward the Eiffel Tower and it never seems to get any closer. But then suddenly, you turn a street corner and there it is! 

And then you are standing beneath it, and if you had any doubt that you are in Paris, that doubt vanishes now....