A new year begins, full of promise, hope and expectation.  Two thousand years and counting, and more before, in this  life.

Recently, I compared my work to speeding along, in a canoe.  Zephyr (?) used to blow gentle winds to help the vessel stay on course, and the Ancient Greeks weren’t foolish to disregard the eyes of the gods above, despite the posturing of Odysseus and most of the protagonists of the tragedies.  So, here I am in my canoe, with lonely oar, traversing through a water of words, but aware there are many who guide me along.  My family, who listened without severe criticism at my drafts, my niece who was clear and focussed in her wants of a good story, and my friends who suggested a deadline and are holding me to it.

Victrola Beans, grinding

The interweb distracts, the new teaching year calls, and then there’s my hair, falling like…

*

There’s the Grace Paley story, “A Conversation With My Father,” in which the father wants his daughter to write like Chekhov, which I would insert here, but it’s a good New Year’s quest for anyone up for it.  I will print the link for a wonderful hilarious take on The Canterbury Tales my friend Andrew alerted me to:

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2011/01/video-crazy-cool-history-teachers-lit-pop-mashups.htm

(you click on directly in “blogroll”)

A Happy New Year To All

Winter Soltice Moonrise by Di

The sky and the snow have certainly put on a show here on the East Coast. Huge drifts of the accumulated 24″-29″ look like sand dunes, if sand dunes were white. While neighbors used snowplows, my brother and I cleared out his driveway. Okay, I did 1/16 of a quarter of the work, but I certainly lent moral support.

My niece says, rightly, in reading a bit of my manuscript fit for her eyes, “but where’s the problem?” Being a great reader, she knows good stories need a problem, something to drive the plot along. So far, all she’s seen is a little boy waiting for a ferryboat to dock. Could he get lost? Kidnapped? But in grown-up stories, these are frightening matters. She looks at me with exasperation. “That’s why it’s a story.”

She has just read the The Secret Garden which not only has secrets but mysteries. What’s the difference? Secrets are revealed and mysteries,solved, I guess. A boy waiting for a ferryboat to dock. It does. Passengers emerge, hugs all around. Then, everyone has coffee. That’s how the story is going. What is hidden? What is lost? What transpires? Well, the coffee is good.

Above, from my dear intrepid photographer friend, who sent this picture above at 6:00 AM. There’s mystery, there’s change. Let me google a moon poem( from The Poetry Foundation)…  Here is one by a rare and wonderful poet, who hopefully might forgive my formatting.

Burning the Old Year

BY NAOMI SHIHAB NYE

Letters swallow themselves in seconds.
Notes friends tied to the doorknob,
transparent scarlet paper,
sizzle like moth wings,
marry the air.

So much of any year is flammable,
lists of vegetables, partial poems.
Orange swirling flame of days,
so little is a stone.

Where there was something and suddenly isn’t,
an absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space.
I begin again with the smallest numbers.

Quick dance, shuffle of losses and leaves,
only the things I didn’t do
crackle after the blazing dies.

Naomi Shihab Nye, “Burning the Old Year” from Words Under the Words: Selected Poems (Portland, Oregon: Far Corner Books, 1995). Copyright © 1995 by Naomi Shihab Nye. Reprinted with the permission of the author.

Source: Words Under the Words: Selected Poems (Far Corner Books, 1995)