I tell a story about her, and she is me.

I’ve been away from here, but of course I’ve been at writing every Friday. I took a two week class with the BRILLIANT Susanna Sonnenberg in Provincetown, and it was gutting and hard and clarifying and so wonderful. I stayed right in the center of town, two blocks from the bay, in a tiny little un-airconditioned two room apartment at the top of some fairly rickety wooden steps, and every morning I rose and walked four blocks to the Fine Arts Work Center and spent three hours with Susanna and the group of writers there working on structuring larger projects, and then walked in the sun back, my head full of ideas. I was in Provincetown with my beloved, and the two of us shared this tiny space. We read and read on the beach, spent so much time walking. My life felt so simple and full of ease (though certainly with less comfort than I’m used to), and it made room for the landscape of my mind to be more complex. We can create and work and live with much less. In fact, it is in many ways much easier to create with less stuff. But to be honest, I really love my stuff and was happy to reunite with all my earrings when I came home.

This week the freewrite was: “I know this about water….”

And the poem we read was “Crown for the Girl Inside” by Lisa Low, a series of 7 connected sonnets. The prompt from this stunning poem was to move between third person “the woman spent two weeks in Massachusetts” and first person “and I wondered why she doesn’t always listen to her own ideas” Playing with this idea of story, of changing story, of how when we tell a story about our past selves, we are in fact telling a story about another person. And we, the one telling it, are quite different than that person.