The ziplock of summer fruit is emptied.

I did 3 readings and an author’s day. I sent 2 submissions, and 3 of 4 reviews that I have on tap. I repaired a few book bindings, read a whack of things, located 2/3 mislaid books. I’m averaging a title read every 5 days, some 16 pages, some 400+. I found a new contest judge for next year for the haiku contest I coordinate for Haiku Canada. I’m talking with two poets who might let me publish a chapbook of their poems this fall and spring. Taking a page from Tanis I’m taking names and seeing if we can start a local silent book club. Humming along.

I’d put more poems here if it weren’t such a bother of manually making it back to single spacing.

Cathrine Walker has made a lovely review of We Astronauts with her really getting it. I’m fortunate in reviews, this being my second active listening feedback.

I write in fragments whose centre has not been found. Or isn’t needed.

I might do a couple day vacation next week.

Emily Austin is delightful and has a new novel coming out. I’m going all completist on her.

Gay Girl Prayers by Emily Austin (Brick, 2024) is fabulous. And now shortlisting for the Lampman Award as it should.

Maybe you have to be born into Christian fundamentalism and be out the other side to find this redemptive, funny, poems to salve your soul from the scarring and jump scare of hell and brimstone 

It may be my fav poetry book ever. (Or Seed Beetle: poems by Mahaila Smith.) Read each three times. At least it made me feel healed and happy & vindicated & I paused and laughed & had my mind delightfully tickled as I read it the first time entirely too fast.

Some play within particular verses but I think this book might be more accessible to anyone queer-leaning and feminist.

This Thursday I’ll be participating in a Factory reading at Avant-Garde, Ottawa with Shery and Jamaal. Jen had to cancel. Details.

To think I once was once juggling a dozen blogs. And now? A post every quarter at one or two places… For the curious, or compulsive readers who must finish a paragraph, I once had this poetry blog, a cat-narrated blog, one for flash fiction, a vegan recipe blog, a daily life, and a poem-a-day, a daily selfie blog, a weekly portrait of B blog, one written by a sock monkey, a weekly in Spanish/French, a dream journal, a haiku one, all unhooked from each other because that much hyperglossia would look crazy, no? And I would often binge-write and then let it autopost in an orderly fashion to give the semblance of steadiness while I, behind the screen, crashed.

A difference is keeping things for myself these days. And rather than throw things indiscriminately, I share cautiously with those who have earned trust. Who actually are invested in me. Terribly at odds with being a poet, I know. 😉

The frantic train station of my head showing less traffic. Meds are good. Some high seasons are down. People have stopped dropping like flies so less concussive death. I’m processing more and doing more rather than reflecting. I previosuly used all my energy as an introvert on extraversion. People said I have so much energy but I had a boom-crash cycle where after an event I didn’t function or ran the red line of panic attacks and living inside headache constantly. I mean daily headaches from early 80s to 2015 or so.

I laughed more then but chuckled not at all. I was wrapped way tight, keeping myself hopped on excitement, hafta, hafta, gotta, and sugar to extend my comfort zone, keep the walls from crushing me, learning to talk. I was aways stacking triggers to prove myself I could do anything, then wondering why everything was hard.

It’s an interesting fast headspace and I could parse at speed but there’s the sensation of inspiration without..something. The sensation of being productive is not the same thing as useful. Or as being present.

Only by hyperfocus through text I could pull out one thread of purpose from the many tangled threads and find a piece of what felt like order.

Now order is slow and quiet. Of course there are structural changes to make that happen. Ghosting bad dynamics and being less passive, more intentionally choosing instead of drifting. Balking, refusing to play, giving up FOMO, letting go of more, givng myself space to see patterns, to act not only react.

Instead of having my hand in many pies, on committees and publishing, going to many events, trying to keep contact with many people, living in thin-walled places where neighbours scream at each other and traffic noise never stops, I read instead. Probably 3x as much as when I was peak “busy”.

At risk of going on too long for the medium’s attention span, now I make slow time face-to-face with people. I take less on as my responsibility. Indifference can be depressive trait, but it feels more centred than off-kilter. I am not constantly pushing myself to overstimulated for fear if I stop I will wither and atrophy and be forgotten. My place in the universe is less-ego driven than when I was trying to people-please.

I don’t want to lose days anymore to overdoing it. Maybe it is learning cause and effect, maybe it’s maturity, maybe it is a case of too old for that shed. I don’t have much energy and my body is liable to act up with nausea, vertigo and pain if it thinks I’m doing more than I should. It’s quite opinionated.

I’m more secure, and less self-defeating. My nature hasn’t changed but the balance has. And that’s, I think, something more sustainable.

Some writing experts with courses seem to harp on about linearness. You start something, you finish something. Process is negated without reaching for the brass ring of product. Big emphasis on closure. It makes sense. It’s an economic model of you pay for classes, you get your money back in sales therefore offset courses.

For some writing is all about organization, discipline, regularity of habit, mapping. Of course, that’s planner vs. panster in the novel-writing world. And I am both. I love both planning and improv. I am good with open-ended prompts, structured constraints and lack of either.

I start my brain in the morning with random articles from Wikipedia (the downloaded Kiwix) and was struck by Monet’s process for his haystacks.

“Certain effects of light only last for a few minutes, thus the canvases documenting such ephemera received attention for no more than a few minutes a day.”

“[H\is willing helper was quickly bringing as many canvases as her wheelbarrow could hold.^[17] Monet’s daily routine therefore came to involve carting paints, easels and many unfinished canvases back and forth, working on whichever canvas most closely resembled the scene of the moment as the conditions and light fluctuated. “

I am not Monet but I do live in changing atmosphere and light.

I typically am writing whatever I write, not to project. When I have a research-based project, I steer thataway but otherwise any manuscript is a cobbling together later-problem.

When I have a few comparable, I have a theory of cluster and can tag things to go to that pile as they appear but I’m generally got at least half a dozen to a dozen active manuscripts. And that which fits nothing. That makes sending to magazines hard because the new edge of not fitting is most exciting but magazines want a congruent set of compatible 3-5 poems.

Some do, but I won’t refuse to write/think/feel/try to parse because I didn’t anticipate that direction and don’t know “what use” it will be.

Perhaps that’s a father-legacy, though none he’d want as a mantle. His snort of dismissal or disgust that something or some subject is “useless”, “what good is it”. (That was, admittedly his depression speaking, his defeated moments rising, not his central self.) Still the internalized echo and my inner no then reminds me that the marginalia and the stuff that doesn’t fit is as much of value. As rob mclennan likes to say, “it all counts”.

There’s not a lot of pattern to what paintings or poetry I like. I tend not to like high emotive lyric or chaotic visual poetry but then, sometimes it resonates.

I’m comfortable with things not fitting patterns, with ideologies in conflict held in parallel.

I don’t have to apply a matrix of meaning, shove things into significance, binary or otherwise. If I were to have a guiding principle it would be the buddhist parable of the farmer who received the wild horse on his property. Neighbours telling him, What good luck! And him non-committal. Much is contest and context changes. All things are all things.

This “wishy-washy” attitude of mine annoyed all the right people growing up who accused me of being so open minded as to be mistaken for someone with no mind at all. (Oh, bully uncles, I saw you as such then too. So afraid of so much, they wanted to be categorically superior. Who ground them down so hard?)

I get higher energy not just have tolerance for chaos as basic reflection of universe. Even Lauren Harris sort of excluding all but the primitive shapes, overly constrained, sits comfortably. I’ve thought of inserting into my novels in progress someone high on butting in chronically with IDIB (infinite diversity, infinite beauty) to riff off Gene Roddenberry. Perhaps it will make the cut.

The process though at its core is being alert, figuring out, curiosity, not the finite dimensions of book, as perishable as a conversation. Staying in the game. With people who also want to play the game. Books are sweet discrete outcomes, sure. Being present for each moment is valuable. Says she, having forgotten to stand, or walk the dog. 🙂

Work in progress. Always.