I haven’t posted much lately, though news is happening, all around me. Some writers talk about being in the stage of gathering. I am not gathering, exactly, though perhaps I am always gathering. Mostly, I am reaching not in but out--with letters, queries, stories, essays, manuscripts, manuscripts, manuscripts.
Hello.
Did I tell you of the time I ran into Peter Bogdanovich? Literally. He wore aviator sunglasses (inside) and a white racing scarf. He said: Ho there, little lady. This was on a stairwell. He was very tall with hair grease. I was twenty-one and late for a poetry reading.
But now I think it was whoa. Whoa there, as if to a horse. He caught my arm for a second.
And I did slow down for a bit. At least, I thought of myself as cooling. I called myself a "slow writer" to The New York Times for a story they never ran. I would like to revise that. Check your sources. It’s nearly my birthday so I can do such things.
I am a careful writer.
To paraphrase a beautiful thing my husband said when we first met, I feel serious about you, world.
You have something of mine coming to you.
Oh, I know we’re getting impatient for snow. We hoard it. We’re jealous. We watch the weather. We guard the skies. We take pictures. And when it came, when we woke up to even a little blue light, we gasped. It mattered.
I would like my words to.
I would like them to last. I am working on making them into a thing you can throw in a bag and take on a train. A thing you can fall in love with and asleep to, disappear into, take home to your mother, read to your son, give away, cry on; it won’t mind. I am working on making it careful and right. I am working on making it so it will hold. It will hold.
It’s taking time. I am careful. I am snow. I mean every word.
