"So, are you working on a book?"
My father spent the question to be casual, mid-inning of a baseball game, but my pulse quickened all the same. Of course I'm working on a book. I'm working at least two books, and maybe three.
A writer has to keep her eyes on the page in front of her: the drafting. But we also have to keep our eyes on the horizon: the applications, the submissions, the arrangements. I've been working really hard editing an anthology that has neither official announcement or cover art yet. I've been setting up commitments in tandem with a 2018 visiting writer gig that has no press release yet. I've selected poems to be translated into Greek, for a festival where the participants' names are not yet on the webpage; afraid at every turn that the current political climate would curtail funding.
This was the summer that I finally set up a professional filing system for my records as a teacher, which I began doing--in a serious, sustained sense--in 2014.
This was the summer that I purged my closet of items designed for my body as it was and delighted in buying some new clothes for my body as it is. I made those purchases in Charlottesville on the Downtown Mall, on a Tuesday. On the Saturday later, a racist someone crashed a car through that same intersection and willfully killed a protestor advocating for a better version of this country.
This was the summer where I kept wanting to make glib or celebratory postings on social media. But every time I checked the news I thought "Maybe when things aren't so fraught." There are things so much more important than this.
That said: I'm here. You're here. Thanks for being here.
