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.