#NewThisDay Writing From My Photo Stream
Leaving Los Angeles
Home, easily, home. Long day of travel, but all ease and work. I work so wonderfully on planes! I should travel more, perhaps. Ran into a few other AWP writers I knew at the airport, final conversations of the travel. Then, I revised my poem for tomorrow. Done. Ready to send. Wrote two blog posts, and sent. Then drafted an erasure poem for my manuscript that has been on my mind all week. Just in time to land. Done with the Ann Frank book, I am listening now to The Equivalents: A Story of Art, Female Friendship, and Liberation in the 1960s, by Maggie Doherty, which opens on the relationship between Anne Sexton and Maxine Kumin. From the jacket:
In 1960, Harvard's sister college, Radcliffe, announced the founding of an Institute for Independent Study, a "messy experiment" in women's education that offered paid fellowships to those with a PhD or "the equivalent" in artistic achievement. Five of the women who received fellowships - poets Anne Sexton and Maxine Kumin, painter Barbara Swan, sculptor Mariana Pineda, and writer Tillie Olsen - quickly formed deep bonds with one another that would inspire and sustain their most ambitious work. They called themselves "the Equivalents". Drawing from notebooks, letters, recordings, journals, poetry, and prose, Maggie Doherty weaves a moving narrative of friendship and ambition, art and activism, love and heartbreak, and shows how the institute spoke to the condition of women on the cusp of liberation.
Home. A quiet house, clean too. No dogs to greet me, but loved ones, the human kind, a daughter and grandson asleep in my bed. Reflecting on my trip, to San Francisco to see Liz and then to LA with Jenny & the conference, how present I felt on this trip, how engaged. My mind was with me. In Costa Rica, although I enjoyed myself, I see from the vantage point of this trip that I never completely landed. So much of my mind and concerns stayed home. Worried about the dogs, worries about the weather, the house in my absence, Wave in my absence, my daughter in my absence. Much of the worry in my own head, of course. But, how satisfying this trip was, and stimulating. And I didn’t feel like I needed to be home taking care of everything. Tomorrow I will wake early, be tired perhaps, but not too tired to drive Wave to school and see his new haircut and find out how much he has grown in a little over a week and see how Mikey and Squirt made out in my absence. And breakfast. I get to make breakfast. And see the sun color the sky and the current on the river and how high are the wetlands, how muddy the paths, how budding the trees? When the rooster crows at the break of dawn. . . I’m home.