Buried in paper
Sometimes I agree to do more than I should.Sometimes everything I have agreed to do comes at once.Sometimes I feel like an idiot or a literary masochistWoody and I agreed to serve as editors for a fiction edition of 5th Wednesday, a zine we both like and in which we have both been published. But when the stories started coming, Woody was busy with WOMR and I ended up the sole editor. I had to solicit stories as well as go through the ones the readers there sent on to me. It was pleasant in its way and I would have enjoyed it more if I didn’t have piles of mss. coming in from two other sources.I am reading mss. for my juried intensive poetry workshop I give here every June. I read several mss. every day. They’re important to me as I want to choose poets I believe I can work with to improve them. indeed, just about every poet who has taken the workshop has been published afterward; and those who had already been published generally got published more and had books accepted. It’s a good tough workshop with a very strong emphasis on craft and also on being able to deliver your poems at a reading.Then WOMR asked me to judge both the regional and the national poetry contests named for my dear friend Jose Gouveia who died in 2014 after extended bouts with cancer. I judged last year before it was renamed for Jose and the regional poems were badly screened by the first reader. I ended up asking for them all, so this year I didn’t use any first readers but read the great pile of regionals. I have now read them all – gone through the possibles twice. Today and tomorrow I have to winnow the better entries and rate them, first, 2nd, 3rd and honorable mentions – eight poems in all. I found some very good ones.I’ll be getting the nationals in about 10 days.I did manage to seize some time to write a poem yesterday, which made me feel less indentured. I started another I hope to get the time to return to today or yesterday. I still hope to get back to my unfinished short story s o m e d a y.We’ve finally had some sun – it’s sunny today. It has gotten colder but with the sun, I am cheerier. It’s more like our usual winters, as opposed to the constantly overcast skies I grew up with. Many birds about. Xena is indignant. the birds she says are stealing seeds and encroaching on her territory. She chatters at them. They ignore her. That wounds her pride.Tonight I think I’ll make scallops.We’re in the midst of a decluttering campaign. We got rid of three boxes of Woody’s unwearable clothes this week, all to an acquaintance who takes clothes to the homeless around Hyannis. A lot of homeless live in the woods on the Cape. I went through my old underwear and turned a bunch into rags. We can always use rags. Now we’re doing triage on books. Books we never got around to reading and never will – sent to me for blurbs I never gave. Books one or the other of us have read but will never reread. Books read and reread and now off to the library sale.