Confession Tuesday

We are waiting for the second of three storms to will dump nearly a foot of snow in New England. Fortunately, schools decided to close well in advance. I’m all in favor of hitting the reset button today. It’s nice to have a day off in the middle of the work week.

Of course, in a few hours, I’ll have to break out the snowblower.

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My friend Dawn says I need to write an “I love snow” poem, noting my overall dislike of snow. While I have often said I like the idea of snow, I don’t like shoveling it. 

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Recently, I've had few great conversations about writers going to the dark side. Much of the talk arose from the recent and untimely death of Philip Seymour Hoffman, how artists do this strange dance with the darker sides of their personalities. How do you tap into it without letting you control it?

I haven’t come up with any answers, not really. But I know in my writing I can embrace it without letting fear or hate control me. Not easy, but some of my best writing has come out of entering those two cathedrals.

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I may be stepping into the breach pretty quickly. For a year, I have stayed away from the Juno project. This is a poem project of mine about a slave and her family who lived in my town.  I just haven’t wanted to approach the topic. It is a difficult subject to write about, but I've been putting too much pressure on myself to complete something instead of enjoying the process. We’ll see what happens in February.

In the meantime, I have been writing and revising. I do have new poems but they’re weird. They just are. Time for something new.

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I haven’t talked about Mass Poetry festival planning in a while, but preparation for the 2014 festival are going really well--not just for the festival planners and organizers, but for Mass Poetry as a whole. Much, much more to of this.