It’s a question I’ve come to expect in the course of a conversation with anyone who knows that I write, especially since it’s been three years since I published my last collection and just six months since the love of my life died. The answer is yes and no.
No, I don’t have a project or even the draft of a poem in the works.
But yes, I am writing. There’s my current 5x7 spiral sketchbook (number 12 in the series) that I open when the mood strikes. It contains observations, records of memorable events, provocative quotes, mandalas, collages and even the New Yorker cartoons that capture some aspect of my life. There’s the yellow legal pad where I do free writes from time to time. These pages help me to pin down my thoughts and offer me a chance to imagine the first line for a poem even though it will likely never come to life. And, as you see, there’s this online journal.
Then there’s the soft leather-bound book handcrafted somewhere in Asia that I received for Mother’s Day. It probably goes without saying that I receive a lot of notebooks as gifts and don’t find a purpose for them all but this small one, with its thick rough cut pages, coming at the time it did, I decided to use. What does it want to become, I asked myself? Not a replacement for my sketchbook, something else. Turns out I keep it next to the chair (Allen’s reading chair) where I drink my morning coffee and use it to record my first random morning thoughts, many of them disconsolate, some of them surprising. I don’t know that this will come to anything but we’ll see where I am when I’ve filled the pages.
It occurs to me that what’s missing from my writing practice is correspondence—not emails, but the old-fashioned kind that many writers of note took pains to maintain with family members, friends, readers and publishers back in the day. I used to do this. Many of us did, but I currently have only two friends who post letters and these are rare and precious, both the letters and the friends. I can’t say that I plan to revive my correspondence—emails and even texts have choked out that garden. But I can say with near certainty that I’ll continue my long habit of filling blank pages with words.