Next

I am (I think) 26 pages into my next manuscript, which even has a tentative title.

They are 26 drafty, drafty pages. Mostly short bursts of something. Spliced together.

Over the past year or so, I’ve found myself increasingly comfortable with a new writing technique: sometimes I get this feeling about what I’m writing—that it isn’t finished yet. When I feel that, the next time I write I open the same file I was working on, put in a page break, and write what comes next. I continue to do this until, well,

I have 26 pages of poems. All in a linked little row. And: I’m still going.

I’ve been doing some pre-writing for this project since mid-June. What I was writing then was all over the place: fiction, Carole Maso-esque fiction, poems full of white space. But that wasn’t the project. That was the overture to the project: the main themes, the notes and lines that I’ve blown into full, curvaceous poems. This: reviewing those notes, rephrasing them, expanding on them, riffing—this is the project. The project is a stasis. I’m staying inside it.

It’s awfully sincere.

I’m staying inside it.