The "writing community" I have here is not a workshop or an organized group. It is a small handful of friends who happen to write, who I sometimes show drafts to, who sometimes show drafts to me, and who can be relied on, in the way only a few people in any given life can be, to tell me the truth about a poem before they tell me anything reassuring. That is the entire community. It is enough.
The summer scatters us. Travel, family, the small unsynchronized seasons each of our lives is keeping. By this point of the year the scatter is mostly resolved — we are back in our own kitchens, our own desks, the rhythm of correspondence picks up. I find I am more myself in the after-summer stretch than I am in the run-up to it. Not because summer is bad. Because I am, fundamentally, a person who draws energy from quiet, sustained, particular friendship.
I have been doing what I always do at this time of year — picking back up the small unfinished conversations that lapsed in July. A line a friend sent me about a poem I had abandoned. A draft I owe a reading on. A letter I have been meaning to write for two months that requires real attention and not the version of attention you can give while the dog is staring at the door. The kind of letter, in other words, that earns its envelope.
I want to say something here about craft and community that I am still working out. There is a version of "writing community" that is mostly performance — public posts, photographs of notebooks, the suggestion of a working life rather than the working life itself. I want nothing to do with that version, and I have not, in any honest accounting, ever participated in it. The version of community that has actually changed my work has been small, slow, mostly invisible to anyone outside it, and absolutely uninterested in being photographed.
Never Let Me Down Again
In the echoes of twilight's serene, A promise whispered, barely seen. Through the maze of life, so vast, A vow to hold, from first to last.
Coming soon — included in Echoes From the HeartWhat I have learned, over the long arc, is that the writers whose work has improved mine the most have rarely been the most loudly working writers I know. They have been the ones who do the unsexy long thing. The ones who keep returning to the same difficult subject without making a scene about it. The ones who will tell me a line is wrong without softening it, because they trust that I am here for the line and not for the compliment. Those are the writers whose correspondence I want to be deserving of. I am, in this stretch of the year, trying to be.
I have also been thinking, with a little more honesty than I usually allow myself, about who I have lost from this small circle in recent years — not to anything dramatic, mostly to drift, occasionally to a divergence in what we both meant by the work. Drift is not betrayal. Sometimes it is just calendars. Sometimes it is the poem itself moving in a direction one of you was not going to follow. I am old enough, now, to let that happen without making it a story. I miss those readers. I do not begrudge them the road they took. We were — and may yet, again, be — useful to each other. Most things in a writing life worth keeping have a quality of "and may yet, again, be."
What I have, in the meantime, is the small steady cohort. The handful of names I would still hand a draft to without hesitation. The handful who would still hand me one. That is, increasingly, the only check-in I need at this point of the year. Whatever else I have built or failed to build in the larger noise of a "career," the small steady cohort is the part of the work I am most proud of. It does not make for a public photograph. It does, on the right Tuesday, make for a very good poem.
Yours, in ink and embers,
