Office Work

Over the last few days, I've spent several hours doing the "office work" of being a writer. I prepared a dozen submissions for literary magazines and then three submissions for book contests.

I spent a couple of days tinkering with Glacial Elegies -- took out two poems, added four. It's gotten to the point where I've lived with the manuscript for so long that it's hard to adjust it without feeling like a house of cards is about to come tumbling down. Pick the wrong thread to pluck and the whole sweater vest comes unraveled. Etc. Still, it's nice to feel the poems becoming something more than their individual selves. On rereading the manuscript, I'm sometimes taken by surprise when I find another link between two poems that I hadn't seen before.

New book on the reading table: House Held Together by Winds by Sabra Loomis.