See that gorgeous water behind me? That’s Grand Traverse Bay of Lake Michigan.
It’s been a couple of weeks! I’m tired. The reading at the beautiful new bookstore, Artemis, was great but exhausting, not that I didn’t have plenty of help (thank you so much, all of you) but it’s the planning and staying keyed-up over whether it will go well. You know what that feels like. And, I’m hurting. By the time you read this, I will have had a cortisone shot, with uncertain results. And next Monday I will have had another launch here at Cordia.
Cordia Senior Residential Club: the origin of all this book hoop-la, although I hope, if the book succeeds, it’s not about a place so much as it is about the mind it’s filtered through. And not so much about Me as about the experience itself, through the remove of language and time. Not so much about my personal experience as about all experiences of transition, radical change, and growing old. Growing old has been going on forever, all our lives, but it seems we become acutely aware of it during transitions.
I hope the book is helpful. I hope people who read it feel an authentic voice, and that it helps guide them through their own transition. Honest to God, I only wrote it for myself, to anchor some of the uneasiness of change. But it’s grown like Topsy (look up Topsy). Actually, it’s grown with lots of help from my friend Howard.
We now have a website https://endofthelineclub.com/ and we have a monthly newsletter just now posted on Substack for the first time. Please have a look at them both. (Links are in bold.) I may eventually ask you for a poem for the newsletter. Or comments or advice. We’re working with Tam Perry, professor in the School of Social Work at Wayne State University, (PhD in Social Work and Anthropology from the University of Michigan.) and with Kim Phillips, head of the network of senior centers in Michigan. I’ll be doing some podcasts for senior centers with “all the best people” (as Nicolle Wallace of MSNOW puts it on her podcast).
It’s exciting. I am not getting ANY poems written, which makes me itchy, but I think I will by the time we get to the lake. I already have a whole book’s worth of prose poems ready to arrange and send out, the product of My Winter of Back Pain, and just recently I saw I am a semi-finalist in a chapbook contest. “Oh no!” I cried to the universe. “Please don’t let me win!” Seriously.
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A question I think about: What’s the difference between someone who describes her life for anyone to read and someone who wouldn’t think of doing that? Do I think I have a more interesting life than most? Do I think I need to shape my life so you’ll like me? Do I think I won’t exist unless I get myself down on paper? I don’t know. It feels a bit unconscious, this impulse to write.