SUNGLOW
(Photo by Petunia)
I want to write about the very full weekend we just had...my brother's house, crabs and beers for the adults, and a sprinkler for the wildies to run through. Conversation, laughter, and oppressive August heat that just does not yield. I want to write about our friends' house the next day with horseshoes ringing through the yard, an impromptu wiffle ball game, and a trampoline to keep the kids defying gravity and tumbling together in long-limbed heaps. Summer is almost over. Back-to-school routines hang just around the edges of now and I am conflicted, wanting the time with them--the pressure-free days--the uncoiling of the schedules and routines for afternoons in the tall grass...and yet, also breathing deeply because my writing time will resume the more regular pattern I am missing so much.
Migration Summer was to be finished this summer. This was my goal, the one I worked diligently for right until my first session of teaching back in May when I introduced myself to a new batch of students and was promptly buried beneath exams and essays. With my wildies home as well, no camps or vacations-away, with me every moment, the writing has limped off to a seat in the corner, sulking at me and pleading for any scrap of attention I could spare. It hasn't been much...but, this weekend I sat with my computer typing some sections out again and I realized that I am only short of THE END by about forty pages. THE END is already written, of course, it has just been getting through this re-done middle now. I am almost there...in spite of the lovely distractions of cookouts, pool days, luna walks, lavender harvesting, game-and-reading marathons with my three, I am almost there.
The coming season will mark a dramatic change for me--I am not going back to teaching at the college. I've planned a creative writing workshop and found a beautiful space to use with floor to ceiling windows at the center where my children were born. I have started advertising for it and just hope the women, yes--the mothers--since it is all for them this time--will start to enroll. I taught reading, writing, and literature steadily since 2000 where I was, so this feels like a departure...like a creative risk, but the time was right. I think there comes a time in every life where we just have to take a leap of faith and believe in our own dream--then, follow it wherever it takes us. Migration Summer will be finished this fall...I am almost there and I feel so ready for the next stages.
In the spirit of change and growth, I have launched a new website for myself to use as a professional contact space. Visit here and let me know what you think! Sitting there, compiling my work I had a moment where I felt so proud of the fact that I am taking steps every day and making tangible progress. My website is a touchstone or sorts for me on those down days where I fear that my creative life will falter...almost dreamlike in its way. Speaking of dreamlike, I was asked to participate in a podcast to speak to author, Meredith Hall, about her amazing memoir, Without A Map. We hit the airwaves yesterday, and I was nervous and delighted and excited to speak on the air to a writer whose book I admire so much. To listen to the show, please go here and download the August 5th broadcast. I asked three questions of Meredith, which she answered with grace and insight--my questions are in the second half of the broadcast, but each of the participants had something interesting to ask about the memoir and I believe it is more than worth a full listen!
Back to my sunny side of the street now, resting up for the creative work still ahead of me...feeling very full. On Friday, I will be sharing my review of this book. I am offering a giveaway of the extra copy the publisher provided for me to one random reader who comments about their thoughts on motherhood and paid versus unpaid work...the various ways women seek to compose their lives and make meaning from it. Having been on both sides of the maternal-work equation, with no plans to completely stop spanning that distance anytime soon, I am curious to know what all of you think! I hope your weekend was filled with goodness like mine was...goodness, and that late-summer sunglow, there just for the noticing.
I want to write about the very full weekend we just had...my brother's house, crabs and beers for the adults, and a sprinkler for the wildies to run through. Conversation, laughter, and oppressive August heat that just does not yield. I want to write about our friends' house the next day with horseshoes ringing through the yard, an impromptu wiffle ball game, and a trampoline to keep the kids defying gravity and tumbling together in long-limbed heaps. Summer is almost over. Back-to-school routines hang just around the edges of now and I am conflicted, wanting the time with them--the pressure-free days--the uncoiling of the schedules and routines for afternoons in the tall grass...and yet, also breathing deeply because my writing time will resume the more regular pattern I am missing so much.
Migration Summer was to be finished this summer. This was my goal, the one I worked diligently for right until my first session of teaching back in May when I introduced myself to a new batch of students and was promptly buried beneath exams and essays. With my wildies home as well, no camps or vacations-away, with me every moment, the writing has limped off to a seat in the corner, sulking at me and pleading for any scrap of attention I could spare. It hasn't been much...but, this weekend I sat with my computer typing some sections out again and I realized that I am only short of THE END by about forty pages. THE END is already written, of course, it has just been getting through this re-done middle now. I am almost there...in spite of the lovely distractions of cookouts, pool days, luna walks, lavender harvesting, game-and-reading marathons with my three, I am almost there.
The coming season will mark a dramatic change for me--I am not going back to teaching at the college. I've planned a creative writing workshop and found a beautiful space to use with floor to ceiling windows at the center where my children were born. I have started advertising for it and just hope the women, yes--the mothers--since it is all for them this time--will start to enroll. I taught reading, writing, and literature steadily since 2000 where I was, so this feels like a departure...like a creative risk, but the time was right. I think there comes a time in every life where we just have to take a leap of faith and believe in our own dream--then, follow it wherever it takes us. Migration Summer will be finished this fall...I am almost there and I feel so ready for the next stages.
In the spirit of change and growth, I have launched a new website for myself to use as a professional contact space. Visit here and let me know what you think! Sitting there, compiling my work I had a moment where I felt so proud of the fact that I am taking steps every day and making tangible progress. My website is a touchstone or sorts for me on those down days where I fear that my creative life will falter...almost dreamlike in its way. Speaking of dreamlike, I was asked to participate in a podcast to speak to author, Meredith Hall, about her amazing memoir, Without A Map. We hit the airwaves yesterday, and I was nervous and delighted and excited to speak on the air to a writer whose book I admire so much. To listen to the show, please go here and download the August 5th broadcast. I asked three questions of Meredith, which she answered with grace and insight--my questions are in the second half of the broadcast, but each of the participants had something interesting to ask about the memoir and I believe it is more than worth a full listen!
Back to my sunny side of the street now, resting up for the creative work still ahead of me...feeling very full. On Friday, I will be sharing my review of this book. I am offering a giveaway of the extra copy the publisher provided for me to one random reader who comments about their thoughts on motherhood and paid versus unpaid work...the various ways women seek to compose their lives and make meaning from it. Having been on both sides of the maternal-work equation, with no plans to completely stop spanning that distance anytime soon, I am curious to know what all of you think! I hope your weekend was filled with goodness like mine was...goodness, and that late-summer sunglow, there just for the noticing.
posted by Left-handed Trees... at 2:58 PM
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