July 28, 2008

JS left a note under my office door telling me how much his life was shaped by the introduction to the Romantic poets. "Your class changed me forever. . . . thanks for everything. . . I could never say it enough." There are times when the rewards of this job are inexpressibly vast. So vast that I, at least, do not know how to speak of them.

Most of my mornings I spend sculpting The Falls of the Wyona, and yet I almost never mention it. The temptation is to tell the story of the characters as if they were people I know, as if one of them were me. Joyce warns against talking the story into oblivion. I will never be guilty of that. I talk so little about writing in progress –mostly assuming that nobody’s interested–that it appears that plays and volumes fall out of thin air.

His wife writes of Michael Minor, "My hero is getting stronger everyday." She apologizes because once the miracle she asked everybody to pray for begins to happen, she cannot write of it, but only watch it. I don’t know why I’m so invested in this man and his struggle. I have not met him since I held him in my arms as a baby. Perhaps that’s why. Perhaps it stands in my mind as a struggle like my father’s, but one which can possibly be won.

As You Like It is at the stage of the mechanical, but I think M likes it that way, and so progress from that point may be individual and haphazard. Two conversations about costumes. M confides in me the costume she would prefer Touchstone to wear (sort of street-thug; I like it) and then sighs, "it would have been nice to get some portion of my vision fulfilled." V, the costume mistress, cramming me into a typical Montford faux-Renaissance number, says, "At the beginning M told me what she wanted, but things change every five minutes, and now I don’t know what to do." When I direct, I tell the costume people, "do whatever you want," and I mean it. I intend to live a long time.