I’m feeling oddly crippled at this end of semester. I’ve finished most of the little bits and pieces I had to do—fellowship applications, etc—but there are still tiny administrative things to do in the next week, the kind of things that drive me crazy. And I want just to write, and yet—and yet. Things are coming slowly.

I’ve been starting to think about the shape of a second manuscript. Now—this is not something I envisage coming together for a long time. But—it’s seeding. Three suites. Different types of “monsters.” I wonder if it will work. In, you know, the next five to ten years.

We started up the poetry workshop again today—four of us, add Gewanter, stir. I had this poem that is really the beginning of something—a mere scrap—that is about Hero and Leander, but with an Antarctic fish thrown in because I just discovered “icefish” a week or so again. (My friend Robyn last year described the process of travelling through wikipedia, sticking to the topic you are doing background research and then, all of a sudden, falling sideways into something else. For her, it was biography of the actress who played Rayanne Graf in My So-Called Life. For me, icefish.) I’m frustrated because I didn’t know whether I should workshop that, when I know where it’s going in the next few rewrites. I never know whether to bring something I feel has gone as far as I can take it, to bring something in process, to bring something that has hit a wall…

I want to write. I think it will be scrappy for a while. But I’ve always liked patchwork.