After some weeks of silence, I finally feel sufficiently chastised to get something on this page. I’m back in Swannanoa at the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers residency, where I am surrounded for ten days by excellent writers and good people. Coming back here feels like slipping on a comfortable pair of pants. (Insert your own crotch joke here if you like, but that’s not what I was aiming for.) There are lots of opportunities to hang out, and the temptation is there to do nothing but– at the expense of quite, meditative time. I’m feeling quieter than I did this summer, or last winter. Maybe even a little moribund.

My main objective for the ten days: don’t get sick. I have vitamins and Airborne and all that god stuff. Must stay healthy. Must live healthy.

I realized on the way up here that I’d managed to go through the motions all December without working on a poem. Simply the promise a good WWC drubbing was enough: as I was driving up the mountain, I started working on one in my head.

It feels strange to write in this blog. I have enjoyed the time away from it. Perhaps my next life will be a much more private one.