Too busy with family and too sick with a resultant head cold that moved into my chest last night, I’ve not been doing much creatively as of late. (Except for yesterday’s poem, which I will probably proffer to Read Write Poem, in lieu of something for the homunculus prompt, even though that is a fascinating concept. I want to spend more time on it: For example, how many or which would I deal with, for in my case I imagine nested little-women/men-in blue-suits/clown garb to wrestle with. And there’s another impromptu prompt some other folks have dreamed up that has captured me (alternative histories, in a too-simple nutshell).

I’ve defaulted to photos and hikes, and that is not a bad thing.

I have been reading novels, though. I am about 4/5 through Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner, which I’m enjoying, although the pacing is very slow. (Am I repeating myself?) His portraits of characters in the old west using landscape as a character in itself is, of course, wonderful. But I think all my online doings has stultified my ability to concentrate on longer work. So I must make sure I read something that requires a little more concentration on occasion. Cross training for the brain, you know.

For my writers’ reading group (next week! or is it the week after?) I have Wintering by Kate Moses with our “Craft Question: How can historical fiction integrate work by the subject (in this case Sylvia Plath’s poetry) successfully?” I am enjoying the book so far, and now that my neighbor-friend Libbi brought me by her 1966 (? — the book has a $2.25 price on it) version with the Robert Lowell foreward, can track the poems with the novel, which is at once historical, fictional, biographical and scholarly. For better insight on that topic, go to Modern Confessional Writing: new critical essays, edited by Jo Gill and Tracy Brain’s article, “Dangerous Confessions: Sylvia Plath“. Since, however, Tin House Summer Workshop is also that week, I might have to bail on the discussion to avail myself of friends in town and readings associated with the Workshop.

This is the weekly trip to the booth, as prescribed by January. Not too confessional. I don’t have it in me to bear my soul today. I can barely write in short sentences that make sense. In point of fact: I haven’t.

Deb’s confessions