#NewThisDay Writing From My Photo Stream
Charles River morning
“If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”
Henry David Thoreau, Walden
The sun was glittering the Charles this morning, early. Just me and Charleston. We walked around the river and past the brook and into the woods and stopped here and there to appreciate some ice. My preparation for the Farm Pond Writers workshop was done so I was able to take my time. I was so looking forward to being in the writing studio with everyone after almost three weeks of break. I brought a writing prompt based on New Year’s Intentions, rather than New Year’s resolutions, and shared four excellent New Year’s poems by Naoimic Shihab Nye, Kim Addonizio, W.S. Merwin and Li-Young Li and a prose excerpt from Thoreau’s Walden. (Readers, want to write from this prompt? E-mail me and I’ll be happy to send it.) Outside the studio the pond glittered and gleamed in the sun sending a sparkling energy up into our pens. I went home very satisfied and reconnected, as I believe the writers did as well. I have a decision to make about a poem submission that I’ve been thinking through today. A journal editor wants to publish some excerpts from my Post Cards from the Gulf series, featuring both the post card poems and the photos; not all of them. And that makes sense to me. And I’m delighted she wants these. But I’m just trying to think through the best way to present this series and decide whether I want to let some and not all of them be published first. In the late afternoon, at dusk, as the sky grew purple and pink and the nearly full moon rose over the river into a deep blue sky, Frank and I walked across the meadow and to the river and through the woods a bit, and the dogs came, and the wind blew, and Frank was so cheerful and chatty and lighthearted suddenly today. I know he has his mother’s health challenge very much on his mind and heart. But he had lightness of spirit at dusk, and it was lovely to be with him at this hour letting the wind blow at our backs and over our heads, and crunching through the thin trial ice together, being happy in this moment together on our property on a January day.
Writer’s Studio, Farm Pond Writer’s Collective