A couple of weeks ago while I was walking my usual salt marsh route on a hot but not oppressively hot mid-day, I saw a deer gingerly sipping the marsh's brackish water. That deer must have been really thirsty, I thought to myself. A beautiful animal, but not a beautiful sight.*
Meanwhile, I've been in a writing drought--thankfully, not the kind of drought that has dire consequences for the world.
Meanwhile, I've been in a writing drought--thankfully, not the kind of drought that has dire consequences for the world.
I haven't been estranged from all writing: in fact, I've been reading other people's writing and really appreciating and enjoying it. Monique Roffey's The Mermaid of Black Conch, Amor Towles' The Lincoln Highway, and Ann Patchett's These Precious Days are all books that I'd recommend. All very different, and no evidence of drought to be found in any them.
As far as my own writing goes, I did start several blog posts in these last couple of months, but after poking at them so much that whatever moisture they contained drained out of them, I abandoned them. I was equally hard on two poems I began: I didn't feel so much that I was working on them as that I had taken early versions of them hostage and tormented them over a period of several weeks. Thanks to my poetry writing group's interventions, they survived. Who knows? Maybe at some point they'll thrive. My own poetic thriving has been more of an open question.
* The little research I did says deer can and do adapt to brackish water if they must, but they prefer fresh water.
