Most of my reading is all about classes and preparation for classes. I'm into NEW SUDDEN FICTION, thinking that I'll use it for my undergraduate course next semester. And 3 AM EPIPHANY, a book of exercises that Tammy Minks suggested to me. 

I get to a certain point in the semester where I write smaller and smaller units of language. A line added to a poem or a few words changed means much. It means I haven't given up the life that's mine in favor of the life that's required. There is always that tension. I accept it as a constant. 

I went to Mississippi right before Thanksgiving to read at a fundraiser for SonEdna Foundation, people who are encouraging the young people to read and write. I read from my Mississippi novel that seems to want to morph into a play. That had to be the toughest audience for that material. I hope they meant it when they said I'd nailed the place. My mood always improves in Mississippi. The night after the fundraiser was spent eating a vegetarian feast above Miss Del's and going out to Red's to listen to Big Jack Johnson perform. There was a general sense of carousing. Lovely. 

I plan to teach a workshop for women writers over 40, here at home, starting in January. A few of us have decided that this will be a good way to while away Sunday afternoons this winter. 

I work on my play, set in Baltimore, about prostitutes who want to get off the street. I recently made contact again with the agency that allowed me to shadow them a few years ago. They serve the prostitute population by providing water, condoms, clothes, showers, hot meals, and counseling, if someone wants counseling. So I have a contact there who will ask the women anything I require. I feel blessed by their willingness to share. The theater department at Purdue has offered to stage a reading of the first few scenes. This spurs me on. 

Yet, the holiday season is nearly upon us. And I do plan to take time off to play with the children in my life. 

I will do my best to keep posting HOME PLATE. 

I mentioned to a former student that I am writing a play. He said, "Oh, that sounds good. I'm so tired of describing things." I had to laugh. Eventually after writing nothing but dialogue, though, I long desirously for prose, prose, paragraphs of lyrical rumination, tiny tidbits of character. What's in a woman's purse, under her bed. The grass is, truly, almost always greener. 

I finished the copyedits for a story coming out in THE NORMAL SCHOOL. The edits were tricky -- some tense changes and re-working of sentences. It was a puzzle to solve and I hope we solved it in a way that serves the story. I am always grateful for copy editors. It makes me happy to have a story coming out. It is a youthful feeling -- I can remember the first time my poems were published in a little magazine that came out of Hopkins in Baltimore -- THE CHARLES STREET REVIEW. I lived in a basement apartment then on St. Paul Street and worked downtown at Enoch Pratt Public Library. It was thrilling. The world of little magazines -- how they thrive, and with what beauty and devotion -- never ceases to amaze me. Going to AWP in worth the book fair. It dazzles the eye and overwhelms. 

Do you have a little magazine you love? Please write a comment and tell us about it. 

If you're reading HOME PLATE, I have posted 2 new chapters. 

Now I find myself wondering about how to separate from my animals long enough to be productive. This may sound silly to those people who don't have animals. But those of you who share this issue, you know who you are. I have decided to avoid eye contact with my dogs while I'm writing. This may entail shutting them out of my writing room, but I hope not. 

Women with children or animals: how do you make space for your work? 

I'm reading the fall issue of GLIMMER TRAIN. Last night I read an admirable ghost story in that issue by Sean Padraic McCarthy. Titled "Preservation." It's about a guy whose wife dies in an accident and leaves him with three little girls to raise. There was a tinge of Andre Dubus, the elder, about the story. Very good story. GLIMMER TRAIN never fails me when I want a good story. 

Finally, after all the labor of moving, my natural routines are emerging, and they are routines that have grounded me all of my writing life. I wake up between 4 and 5. I feed the cat and make a cup of coffee. It's very strong coffee. I read a little and then begin writing after the caffeine kicks in. Last night, I got into bed a little early -- around 8:30 -- and I was able to return to the story I'm working on. The stream of writing, thinking about writing, wading in that water all the time, has been slow to come back. I've been in a dry season. Now it feels good. 

I have posted more of HOME PLATE. In revising the Irish sections -- and the Swiss section embedded in the Irish section -- I was excited by the images I had gathered on my travels and the way they seem to neatly fit into the story. This precipitated a longing for travel. Seeing a new place almost always wakes me and makes me want to write. Sometimes I think it would be nourishing to travel with a group of women writers. We could settle in somewhere for a month, explore, write, and share our work. La Muse in southern France has come up more than once as a possible site for such a jaunt. We'll see if this fantasy endures. 

To return to writing I've been KINDLE-reading a book called THE PLAYWRIGHT'S PROCESS: LEARNING THE CRAFT FROM TODAY'S LEADING DRAMATISTS. I find that I'm working on several projects, like a patchwork. This makes me a little anxious, fearful that I won't finish one of them, but I'd rather be writing than waiting for the next thing in the novel to make itself clear. The play is set in Baltimore. The glimmer that started it all is the memory of a cold, dank night in 1974 when I went with a shipping broker I'd met in a bar out to a Russian ship in the Chesapeake Bay. It was my friend's job to make sure the captain had everything he needed to be happy during his short stay. We took a launch from a pier at Fell's Point and went out to the bay and climbed the tall metal ladder on the side of the ship and were ushered into the captain's quarters, all oak and brass trim, where I was given a Russian beer, while the men did their business. I was terribly afraid of water at that time in my life, so this was a brave thing indeed. Some might say foolish. 

My other immediate writing task is to revise another chapter or two of HOME PLATE. I hope those of you still rading it haven't given up on it. 

Meanwhile, those of you teaching this fall -- enjoy the last few weeks of freedom.