Charles Jensen | Writer

Yesterday we had a wonderful reading by the staff who work with me at The Writer’s Center. Although we see each other on a virtually daily basis and though many of us talk freely about writing and art (including, sometimes our own), for many of us, it was our first opportunity to encounter each other as writers. It did not disappoint.

The event renewed my sense of luck at having the kind of job I do, where I’m surrounded by people who love and care for the art I do as much as I do.

There was great variation among our readers, from a genderless short story narrator to a Kafka-Vonnegut blend of paranoia and humorous insanty to a Danish story in translation. It’s encouraging for me to know that among their many workday talents are mad writing skills too.

I read three new pieces, two of them for the first time, and I felt they worked well. I’ve had a terrible insecurity about a lot of my new poems, but I did some revising over the holidays and feel slightly better about them. My poems in the voices of Dorothy Gale, Omm Sety, and Joseph Smith all felt like they’d come together when I read them.

And I suspect, deep down, the three of them are culminating in a book that examines the nature of faith. In ourselves, in our memory, and in a higher power.