Season of . . .Toeholds It's been five months since my last post!

Photo by K. Iuppa
Wild Violets growing in the Sidewalk Cracks.

Since the Spring semester is over at both colleges, I have been settling into a slower pace. Things are gearing up for the growing season. Soon I will be planting all of the vegetables we have started from seed.  They're growing by leaps and bounds now. The weather has been a bit cold, which has prolonged all of the early flowers and blossoming trees. Everything seems to be in slow motion here.  It was Lilac festival last week in Rochester, but the lilacs weren't in full bloom yet. Nor here.  I keep hoping it will warm up soon.  . . . Since it's been cold, I have been accomplishing a lot in my writer's life.  Every day for the past 10 days, I have been working on my novella.  I am in serious page and word count  now (more than I have ever accomplished). Somehow, I have found a stride and I am truly engaged in the story-telling. I have found a form for this narrative, and I certainly "know" its landscape and time period, but it was slow going (fits and starts, nearly two years ago).  Now it's on track. Every day I write about 5 pages.  Hope to be done by end of June.  I have also been putting together two new collections.  One is my fourth full length poetry collection, and the other is a  40 page collection of prose poems and micro stories. I'm hoping to have both of these ready to be sent off  in next two weeks.

Meanwhile, I have done two full edits of my upcoming  poetry collection, and it's coming along beautifully.  Special thanks to my editor Kevin Walzer (Cherry Grove Collections). Small Worlds Floating  looks  lovely, and I  am very grateful to my sister Karen for the gorgeous cover, and to Peggy Shumaker and John Roche for writing such  thoughtful and supportive  blurbs. Some of these poems were written in my last year of RWW at PLU my MFA program.  I graduated 10 years ago this summer. (How is this possible?)

I have been writing some essays too.  Some have come quickly, without much fuss, and one has been enormously difficult. All I have saved from it is the first paragraph, which makes me wonder about  it all together. It so unruly. But, I guess this is how it goes, or at least for me.