Some Updates after the Northern Winter
We’ve gotten a lot of snow this winter in Vermont and Quebec, record amounts.
Lake Champlain is frozen solid, its surface deep with drifted snow. When we snowshoed on it, sinking into feet of powdery snow, the open sky and white plain of the lake stretched around us. It was quiet out there, except for a family who were ice-fishing. The winter world creating snow dunes on a frozen bay bordering Canada.
I’ve been burrowed in the house for weeks, working with my students, writing, sending my book to publishers’ contests. making fires in the woodstove—venturing out to snow-blow so we can drive the cars, getting wood from the woodshed, filling the bird feeders, sometimes in my pajama bottoms, I admit. February was a very long month this year.
I’ve been doing my best to stay healthy, keep up my strength, stay informed no matter how sad it makes me, and to reach out to my far-flung friends and my local representatives and community. This takes getting enough sleep and showing up at my desk. To be a writer with even a small readership, is such a privilege.
I have some updates about my writing to share. My new poetry manuscript has the working title, The Earth Clock: a cycle. And I will write more about those poems and the structure of the book in future newsletters. There are poems forthcoming from the manuscript in Broadsided, Bear Review, the special Moon Issue of Ecotone, and On the Seawall, with more soon. I will be working on final edits of this new manuscript this April and May at a residency at Moulin à Nef (VCCA in France) in Auvillar, France. I am so grateful for this opportunity (and so happy to be leaving the country for a little while).
I’ll be doing a reading from Habitats in Los Angeles in a few weeks during AWP. Poetry NW Editions is hosting a reading with WTAW Press offsite on Thursday night, March 27th, 5:30-7:30 PM at Shoo-Shoo Baby, downtown. If you’re around it would be great to see you! I’ll also be doing a Habitats book signing at the Poetry NW booth on Friday, more details to follow soon!
I’ll leave you with a note of resistance from my fierce little blue state. Mad River Valley Indivisible members in Waitsfield, VT are out protesting J.D. Vance’s ski vacation with his family at Sugarbush today. Hundreds of pro-Ukraine, anti-Trump/Vance protestors lined the streets and took to the slopes. He had to retreat to an “undisclosed location.” There’s been no let up to the anguish since Trump took office, but yesterday’s brutal display of disrespect and stupidity against President Zelenskyy left no doubt that we are going to have to fight back against this soul-crushing bullshit for a long time.
Keep making your art! Today a chickadee and then a goldfinch sat in my hand and ate sunflower seeds. My friend and I read each other new poems on the phone. Peace!
“The world is violent and mercurial—it will have its way with you. We are only saved by love—love for each other and the love that we pour into the art we feel compelled to share: being a parent; being a writer; being a painter; being a friend.” —Tennessee Williams