I want to write that I’ve been traveling which is true. I’ve been to the ocean and back, up and down stairs, around the block and back to same house I lived in when I was twenty. My boss tells me I am a good closer. She says this b/c I am good at getting donations, hiring teachers, finding art benefactors. But I don’t believe this is true. I believe I am a good path jumper. I like shorts visits, short tasks. If it involves 15 min of my time I am really good at it.

If I met a bear in the woods (always the test of one’s moral character) I would not face the bear nor would I fear the bear I would simply change my direction thus the travels in my life look a little bit like Ms. Packman on speed--all the beautiful yellow lines but no direct course.

I think a better person would have closed her blog—left ya with a bit of mystery, desire to wonder instead of simply leaving the room with the lights on. Oh well I apologize but there’s a bear in the cupboard and a moose in the foyer.

I realized today I am not writing b/c I am blocked or busy but b/c simply I have forgotten how one approaches such things. I don’t remember at all how it begins. I know it was me. I was here and I listened.

At the reading Ms. Gallagher said to me it is good to have a book again and I said yes, it is good to remember the hunger, the hunger to be read. For as much as we may try to convince ourselves otherwise we write for one person alone and it IS ourselves and even when they bound and wrap the book, send it to millions of people it is still only for us—the writer. Funny thing that, a very funny thing indeed.

 

Last night I went to hear Tess Gallagher read at the new library which doesn’t look like a library at all but more of a big museum which is storing every book just in case mankind is suddenly obliterated.

I went b/c I was suppose to be her student last August but her mother was dying and b/c honestly I felt like if I did not do something literary soon my head would implode. Note: not explode, implode—there's a difference.

Gallagher was quiet and lovely and now I want to be quiet and lovely. She gave the best answers EVER during the very horrid part of a reading when people can ask questions like how do you “craft” a poem and what made you decide on the title of your book.

Note: this is generally when I want to start rampant poet killing.

Honestly I just wanted to know if she desired to strangle the man in front of me who wanted her to sign a Ray Carver’s book instead of her own. What are people thinking????

All that said we share the same name, even though she is Teresa with an “H” and we both have poems about head shaving and a hunger to be read. I tried to pull off being called "Tess" in 7th grade (it is in my middle school yearbook) yet no one but me seemed to pick up on the change.

But I did send off three submissions today due to older women poet guilt which is a disease all its own.