May 7, 2018

Planted Janis’ hydrangea.

This is what NCLR has to say about my story:

Watts picked “Corin and Dorinda”  for second place, calling it “a wise story that is, at its heart, a story of disappointment. Despite being an accomplished scholar and teacher, Dorinda watches while her husband gets the ‘real job’ and becomes more and better ensconced in the English department at his small rural college. ‘Corin and Dorinda’ is an emotionally intelligent story about what we are owed and what duty we have to the people in our lives in happy times and especially when we don’t get what we desperately need.” Hopes’s story will be published in NCLR Online 2019, which comes out in January or early February.

Unbelievably tedious final faculty meeting. I remembered why I stopped going. Wanted to show solidarity with our retiring colleagues, but next time I’ll buy them a card. . . .

Last playwriting class of the year. Read through a gigantic play that even the author admitted was something she needed to “get out of my system” before going on to her real work.

May 6, 2018

Reading from Peniel at All Souls (with Andrew on the fiddle) went well, maybe better than I expected. Interesting smattering of students and strangers. Tired afterward, staggering, whimpering tired. Read some of Will’s students’ poetry, one, by Oliver, an 8th grader, had the authority of Blake. I was astonished. Janis gave me a blue hydrangea.

May 5, 2018

Darkling day, but so far without actual rain. Spading out a great invasion of purple bamboo shoots.

Mountain Xpress publishes its “sustainability” poetry contest winners. My second place poem is better than the winner by levels of magnitude. I’m glad they published them all, so I won’t have to make that point myself.

Cinquo de mayo and nobody has invited me out for a drink.

Pink and shell-pink and pinkish-orange peonies blaze in the gardens.

Perhaps I have finished Invisible Husbands. 

May 4, 2018

The terrible anniversary, which we do not forget. Much gardening, perhaps too much. I come out of the sun and lie down in the cool and sleep.

Underpaid Nick by $800 and can’t figure out how.

Sat by the French Broad and wrote of the trees and the geese.

Listening steadily to Mountain Gospel.

Within two hours of finishing Invisible Husbands. It will not be the ending I foresaw.

What of the Christians? If they just danced on their wooden floors crying “Glory!” all would be well. But we parse and pick and pretend we understand the scriptures. We point our bony fingers. Some great spirit must come among us. Some great spirit must overshadow us. Some great spirit must come among us for whom the only greeting we can devise is “Glory!” Overshadow. Bow us down.

May 2, 2018


Dug plots for wild sunflowers, and for something yet to be determined.

May 1, 2018

Had not appreciated the full difference cutting that pine would make. Except for up against the eastern side of the house (where the bloodroots and bluebells lie safe) there’s no spot totally free from the sun. The tool shed, ever in the shade before, spends its evening in a blast of light, as does the pond. The shady groves where I hoped to grow ginseng are golden with evening light. This is mostly good, but it means that the delicate things I planted thinking they were going to spend their lives in the cool and shadow must find some way forward. Today a goldy Oriental cypress went into the ground. I quipped, “In two hours I’ll just feel like planting another,” and the clerk did me the courtesy of laughing.  The silver maple at the eastern edge is dead, but I’m going to try to leave it to the woodpeckers until it falls apart.  Orange and black in the depth of the pool.

April 29, 2018

Sang at Highland Brewery last night for a festival of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. It looked like Carnivale Venice in Hell, but I had a good time, and we either sang well, or to exactly the right audience, or both. I was, for a moment, happy.  Giant moon waiting for us in the parking lot. Towhees twittering as we took the wrong turn and veered around solemn mountains of gravel.