R and R

I'm writing this post from a sunny beach in Hawaii where hula dancers sway to the music of ukuleles and turquoise waves lap the shimmering sand. Ahhhh . . . the South Pacific. Let all worries dissolve in paradise.

April Fools!

So I'm fantasizing about an exotic escape at 3:00 a.m. March has passed in flurries of wind, rain and snow, with only a few intervals of balmy days. Few desert dwellers complain about storms but I have felt as volatile as the weather. Change is in the air and family challenges left me feeling too unsettled to write. Life is never perfect, however, and vacations are out of the question so I must find other ways to resurrect my muse.

One solution came unexpectedly this week. I decided to enter an online poetry contest and consequently revised some old nature poems from college days that described spring. Reading faded words on yellowing paper could have been depressing. (Yes, it's been twenty-six years since I tapped out what seemed to be final drafts of those poems on an ancient manual typewriter. Yes, I've allowed several things to derail writing since then.) Instead, I found myself enjoying the process of playing with line breaks and rhythms and weeding extraneous words. I even came up with some new images which surprised me, considering the initial apathy I'd felt towards these poems. I look forward to receiving some feedback when they are posted on Wilderness Interface Zone.


It's been years since I revisited old poems and memories of a time when writing came easily. As a student in creative writing, I wasn't worried about producing something that would sell. I just tuned in to my senses, looked at the world with new eyes, and then relaxed as I wrote about whatever brought me joy. Here's an example of a college poem (published long ago) that I didn't change or include in my contest entries. Don't ask me why I called it February Solstice (I hate thinking up titles) but I still think it evokes early spring in the high desert.

February Solstice

Fog strays into predawn sage,
Stratum of night unshaping.

Crone hands uncurl the revelation
Cottonwoods' naked grasp.

Her fingers thin into wind,
Groping for transparent spring.

I no longer have much time to sit and contemplate nature; my interests now include people and their interactions. But recreating my early poems left me feeling exhilerated and enthused about returning to the first draft of my novel. It's haphazard and huge, a conglomoration of prose in which I'm trying to find a few gems of truth. Next time I'm tired or stymied by the "critical crazies" I'll pull some yellowed pages from my writing files and try a little R and R: relax and revise.

In the meantime, it's gray and gloomy outside. A luau in a coconut grove sounds great.