End of 2008 Reflections as though I could be or am thoughtful at this juncture what with jangly coffee nerves and grand fir needles crunching underfoot, what with receding snow exposing kiwi leaves moldering in their thick leathery manner across the trex deck, what with Chiloquin behind me and two teaching residencies dawning the beginning of next week. Happy new year happy new year and a little panic what with no settling journal writing, no calming balm of alone time. Here I am alone in my writing room for the first time in awhile with piles and piles of papers and books unsorted unput away. In my bedroom are stacks of clean and stacks of dirty clothes. Stacks is an orderly word, a visual that doesn't coincide with the slidey humps that litter the dresser and floor along with the dog bed made of sheets for Julia's dog she leaves with us when she goes out - the undersheet abloom with blackish shapes created by said dog when she chewed open a green tennis ball a few days ago. But who cares about the sheets? Who can make sense of the residency several days past? This is my thirteenth day at home and I have reflected not at all, have done nothing towards making sense of what I did down south. Maybe what I should do is face that daunting task. Step into it. If I keep going I won't stop, if I bite off tiny bits, I'll be able to chew them. Maybe I am not equal to the entire task, but I could talk about one kid on one day, or about one encounter, or about the experience of driving in snow. I can reread my journal pages as I have begun to do. I can drink water to dilute the caffeine. I can cope and move forward.

It's snowing everywhere in the world
the entire planet a snowball hurling
and I am warm and dry and typing
and what more do I need than that?

In Ashland in the smallest room at the motorcourt
(I love a motorcourt) I wake to a disappointment of snow
I must have driven home last night in the entire falling
which makes me happy for my trip home (I mean
the motorcourt - we vagabonds bond quickly with place.)
Todays weatherground is peppered with winter weather
advisories all the way back to Chiloquin - not winter
weather warnings that might have stranded me here.
My reaction to Ashland was unexpected. I didn't like
the bookstore, the clothes store, the shoe store. I wanted
to sit quietly and write somewhere and there was music
glaring through the coffeeshop which I emphatically
wanted turned off. I longed for the not-enough of
Chiloquin that throws me back upon myself.

In Which I Copy Lines from Poems from Chiloquin Juniors


I live in the necks of trees
As the trees hide in the mist
My soul is hidden in a willow tree.
Spring rain burns away my listlessness.
You may see my thoughts like fish
swimming underwater.
I am unassailable within the citadel of my mind.
I try to fly, take flight from all
the truculent people in this world.
Pain is always combined with doubt.
Harsh stories as black and cold as night, mean words.
Can you hear me now?
The silence is like a yell being smothered with a pillow.
---


TODAY'S THOUGHTS ABOUT THE TRAIN THAT BRAYS
THROUGH CHILOQUINALL HEY AND HEY
HERE I COME I COME I COME ALL EGO AND PUSH
AND SHOVE THROWING ITS WEIGHT AROUND
MAKING CARS WAIT BARGING BETWEEN
CONVERSERS AND THOUGHTS WITH NO MANNERS
AND THEN GONE THOUGH WE'RE STILL HERE
RESUMING WHAT WE DO
A LITTLE ADDLED AND CUT THROUGH


HEY, wait up! wait UP! WAIT UP!
Posted by Laura Gamache at 12:49 PM

Poem Draft with Words from Oregonian Daily Crossword Puzzle from 12/8/08

There are kids whose resistance is elfin
and kids who dig in their heels, don't just goof
off but will themselves to fail. Dream of Sega
and think they're Peter Pan or a son of Milne
(who wasn't very happy was he, Christopher
I mean) back to the kid amidst remotes
and vids with earbud dangling, ceder
of any care. He wants to be anywhere but here.
He oscillates on a frequency, with ocelots
perhaps or owls. Is he more alive for eve
than celebration? Musician but no oboe
in that case. I watch the moon, it's out, his noon
and I'm about to go to bed. Is life a detour?
Are we there yet? Plane ticket to the cine,
musical chairs, can he think of other wheres
or is he playing catatonic on a diatonic scale?
He will not say or write or think but placid
sit and never spark the twinkling of a thought
for anyone like me to see for I don't elevate
his dreams, our hearts don't overlap.

Far away in the wilds of the Klamath Basin where the air is so cold, dry and laden with invisible particulate matter from all the old old wood stoves, in particular my old wood stove, I long for home even with its darkness dampness darkness and duties. I have a love/hate relationship with the mail. I have missed the dailiness of mail in the box and the walk up the stairs to the mail in the box. I have not missed flyers and catalogues. I have not missed bills, and I didn't miss paying bills today. Jim phoned them to me and I paid them online, a fragile tether, odd connection to home. I am off to make an imagined map of something like Forgiveness, Longing or Tragedy to show to the ninth graders as a model for sixth period.

Yesterday I revised a poem about Edward Hirsch in which Czeslaw Milosz, Adam Zagajewsky and Zbignew Herbert figure and this morning I see on the siteminder/meister that someone walked through my blog from Prague. That's some major telepathy!

Today, I am heading off up Route 62 to Fort Klamath to visit the organic store and to Wood River and the park beyond that. I packed a lunch (yes Jim, I did), binoculars and sunglasses. I am practicing intention. I love my spontaneity, flexibility, impulsiveness, but this triumvirate has limited my ability to listen to myself and proceed from a stance - this I think is what people talk about when they talk about being centered. I can become centered in the moment, before whooshing off in random directions. This morning I did not go with my impulse to hop in the car and disappear down any highway, but most likely the road to Ashland (HA you thought I would write ruin!)

The Humument, an apology

When I say The Humument is a cool book, I don't want you to get the idea I've read it. I've looked at it as a collection of wonderful images containing words that were on those pages to begin with. Sometimes I read the words on a particular page, sometimes not. I love the confluence of word and image, but image always seems to trump word. My newly former brother in law is a composer who wrote a composition called "Freed From Words" with words floating in it. Separated. Ineffectual as we all feel some mornings when our feet are cold and the fire won't light, the room ahaze with smoke.

What with all the collaging going on at school and home, I had to look again at Tom Phillips's cool altered book, THE HUMUMENT. Above is page 6. I own a copy. This is how I write now. Short declarative sentences. Or phrases.

I was planning to drive to Klamath Falls to meet my friend for dinner tonight, but she called to cancel - she's sick, her daughter is sick and her husband took a student who had a seizure to the ER in Klamath Falls.

What I was not planning to do today was teach. But I did.

A day abloom with personal creative endeavor capped by a night on the town is instead a day at school - well spent I think but still a day away from my own wordplay, and now another evening alone, though an evening I can devote to wordplay if there's any ticking left in my higher functioning.

Making beauty is the argument I can give for why I'm here in town. Let's make beauty. Let's paste colored paper onto white paper, let's write poetry, let's step away from the s(*& that surrounds us. Maybe if all of us do that the s@(# will cease.

Huh.

Camera left home however miles north and west of here,
though I have the cable to connect it to my computer. sigh.
No photos of my last three weeks in Chiloquin. Today I've
driven to Klamath Falls. Twenty miles north of town I hit
smog, the air inversion, the air stagnation the warning
says will be lifted Saturday. Yesterday it promised Friday
and two days before that it was today. Smog like sparkly
leek soup. Hills invisible. Upper Klamath Lake invisible.
How do the birds breathe? But I must shop and get away
point my yellow beetle north and drive into clear air. Up
at 4 am in tears over what a girl in one of my classes said.
I am so lucky, lucky, lucky, the more I know of these kids
the more I admire them. I will myself to stand with the ones
who speak truth who are truth tellers who point their brave
chins into the facts, focus their sharp eyes and speak and
make art with lives nobody had any right to throw at them.

Go to http://wordsmith.org/anagram/
All the best from,
A manacle harangue aka
harangue a manacle aka
huge almanac area aka
arcane human algae aka
humane arcane gala aka
manage area launch aka
a mean carnage hula aka
Laura Anne Gamache.

Acrostic Poems with Ninth Graders Today!

Lizards view me with slitted eyes
angry red, overheated and lazy
unknown unsung unwittingly
ridiculous floor liers,
acter-outers, resisters
against the gift of possibilities
new though latent in
nether minds brimming with
experience and perhaps love.
Get away from me, they scream,
afraid I will make them think.
Miracle imagination promises
antidote for boredom and dismal
childhoods. We are magicians,
Houdinis drenched but unchained,
each one a scaly multitude.

One benefit of driving eight hours south from Seattle to Chiloquin yesterday is that once I got to Highway 97 the sun was down and the crescent moon was joined by Jupiter and Venus in a clear clear sky all the way south from Highway 58 to the turn off.

Having been home for ten days, it was difficult to adjust to being alone in my little cabin. I ate dinner, read about two chapters of BY GEORGE, got into bed and was asleep before 9pm. The idyllic creative life redoux!

This morning I walked out to the wood shed and retrieved logs and kindling, built my fire and drank my half caf coffee.

Now I sit in the unheated library where there is internet access, but not for long. My right leg has resumed its unhappy cold-twinge, and I can't risk being unable to move at school.

Sheffer Crossword Puzzle Poem Draft 11/24/08

Lassitude palls along the loch
dense and airless as fog truck DDT
chilled lungs, sleeve from a slung on robe

What the heck is sangfroide? It came to me on my walk the other day, I wrote it down in my little notebook.

"self-possession or imperturbability especially under strain" says Miriam Webster online, with "equanimity" as synonym.

I could write an essay on my need for that quality, especially 6th period with the new feral ninth graders. But I promised I wouldn't write about my teaching residency on this website since kids might google me and find it and hear and mess with me because of what I say here.

I have pink eye! Conjunctivitis! Wow! It sounds pretty but is goopy and droopy in actuality. I look my age! My left eye nearly smeared shut with goo yesterday when I drove directly from school to a free clinic in Klamath Falls 30 miles away (the clinic is on the other side of town - if it had been by the library it would have been a scant 26 miles away.) I drove directly into the sun for part of the trip, mainly the part where I was driving along Main Street looking for the clinic and barely making out the traffic signal lights for glare and eye-squinting. At the Fred Meyer to get my prescription filled the pharmacy guys kept paging me back to the counter. My insurance company claims the prescription benefit ran out in March. We didn't have this coverage until March. I paid and took the receipt, wanting to get the first two drops of magic elixer into my eye with no further to-do. Since I am here in Chiloquin with no family or intimates from home, I entered the house and regressed to six years old. I wanted cinnamon toast and old movies on TV. I made myself salmon from the Fred Meyer and a cheddar quesadilla and opened the new bottle of Australian Malbec, which was the first bottle of decent red wine I've purchased since coming here. Anything on the satellite TV that looked good was something my satellite subscription doesn't cover. My (inherited, purchased by my landlord and actually a gift not a right) satellite coverage covers only heavily advertising-laden or Christ-filled or infomercial fare. I pressed one channel that said "Fabulous Boot" thinking it might be a movie, perhaps a sequel to Das Boot? and a woman's voice accompanied by a hand fondling a fur-lined shortie boot came into view. The boot was ugly and in an ugly shade of anemic taupe or I might have continued watching.

The light dims here in the community center - the curator has gone home and locked the doors, so I am deliciously by myself in the space, which never happens so that I am loathe to leave as the protagonist in The Piano Tuner might be wont to remark. Really, I am more 19th century than 21st except for the under and outerwear.

I love that Brok O Bama!

"To the Best of Our Knowledge" on my transistor radio

Patricia Smith, whose Blood Dazzler is on the National

Book Award short list, Jay Parini who quoted Auden

like mad, and Australian poet, Les Murray, fathered by

a man with "an addiction to grief," who said, "I abhor

anything that demands human sacrifice." Last night,

in Chiloquin, Oregon, where we do, yes we do, celebrate

culture and poetry. Jay Parini, a poet, has written a

book called Why Poetry Matters and reminded me how

it does. Patricia Smith led with a poem about a girl

whose mother was known as a drug addict who asked

her to help her write a poem about her mother - dead -

that celebrated the person who sang while braiding

the girl's hair. The question Patricia Smith asked those

Miami-Dade County kids, was, who knows someone

who is dead. "I do," forty hands shot up, "I know a

dead person." Parents dead of AIDS and friends gone

to violence, and six year olds in need of voices, and

she realized that writing poetry is like having a second

throat, and that we poets, climbing to the lectern,

composing our poems, wield a very real power.

This is just to say
Barack Obama
has taken
the presidency
back
for the people
of the United States
as far as I
can see
and I
hope
we're up
for doing
the work.

YIKES!

---

I am the woman behind you in the check-out line
who leans in intimately, whispers, "my son is
dying." You're next. The other lines is longer.
You have to get home befor eyour kids do, your
rollicking, exhausting, robust, healthy daughter
and son. You look away, a social cue I do not
read. "The cancer," I tell you, "is eating his
parietal lobe." "Next!" the clerk says. You have
piled your canned goods atop the whole wheat
bread and your fingers fumble for the keypad
pen. My poptarts, HoHo's and M&M's topple
forward as the clerk lifts the divider with
cigarette ads on its faces. You pass through
the automatic door, see me through glass,
clerk's hand clamped in mine, my mouth moving.
---
I do not have a son.

Should that last sentence be IN the poem?

Presidential Election Day and I woke up to snow
transforming everything, which I take as talisman,
as omen, as foreteller: the transition is upon us -
Obama will be the next president of the United States,
changing the American narrative forever. AMEN.

I am wearing red, white and blue bracelets. I was
wearing my Hawaii sweater, but its wool and too
warm to teach in even on a snowy morning with
that special cranking radiator heat that plagues
our public schools. Yesterday I picked up on what
someone said, "The Short Bus", liked it - it seemed
appropriate for elementary school but the kids
laughed and turned their faces - turns out those
are the buses assigned for special ed - not here in
Chiloquin, but these guys watch TV, they know
the lingo I don't know. Here in Chiloquin it's hard
to get the news - on Sunday when I can get no
internet access I also cannot get the Oregonian,
let alone the New York Times. The Shell Station
has a placard in its window "The Oregonian on sale
here" but the truck doesn't come out on Sunday.
I read the Klamath Falls Herald and Snooze,
and have now fed most of it into the maw of my
wood stove. Let's pretend this is a poem since
I'm giving it a narrow margin. Oh I hope Obama
wins by a margin wider than we've seen in decades.
I want definitive, I want instant confirmation. Jim
said, "I have a meeting at 6pm, I'm afraid it'll all
be over before I get home." I envy his confidence.

And here's Walt Whitman, who as E. Ethelbert Miller
said on Jefferson Public Radio (NPR) to LeeAnn
Hanson on Sunday, "no matter how we see ourselves,
as red or blue states, Whitman saw us all as one."

I HEAR AMERICA SINGING


I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,
Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong
The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam,
The mason singing his as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work,
The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat, the deckhand singing on
the steamboat deck,
The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench, the hatter singing as he stands,
The wood-cutter’s song the ploughboy’s on his way in the morning, or at noon
intermission or at sundown,
the delicious singing of the mother, or of the young wife at work, or of
the girl
sewing or washing,
Each singing what belongs to him or her and to no one else.
The day what belongs to the day – at night the party of young fellows,
robust, friendly,
Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs.

-Walt Whitman


I hope to be singing tonight!

At the counter in the library
a man says "I'm 79, guess I've
got another twenty years to go."
Coughs. He and the librarian
chat about cancer and dead kin.
The acoustics here are bright
and his voice bounces off
blonde bookshelves, reaches
me as though I were wearing
an ear trumpet. "It was '54,
'55, something like that," he
says, chuckles, blows his nose.
The kids along the wall get
to jawing, lined up
at the free public use computers.
"I could tell you a bunch
more stories," the man says,
the librarian says, "I bet."
A kid from one of the carrels
comments loudly. Someone
else turns up the sound on her
computer. A truck blats past.
The man hawks volubly, it
bounces between the science
books and the plays. A boy
pushes back his chair, it rasps
and his friend says, "lays an
egg," which is unrelated. "That
right?" says the libararian, and
"yaaah." "I thought that was
ridiculous," the man continues,
"You take care," the libarian says.
"I'm doing what I can," he says,
and then they get to repeating
goodbyes, he isn't leaving and
she isn't shelving books.

---

Saturday afternoon, November 1st at the Chiloquin Library.
Last night more trick or treaters than I've seen in five years
in Seattle. I went back out to the store to buy more candy,
bought the last two bags - a KitKat and a Baby Ruth. The
remains I brought with me - they're now in the libarian's
basket on the check-out counter. Last night I watched TV,
first time since I got here - Halloween and Jim called from
Shawna and Todd's - Todd had made Jim a Vampire Blood-
tini, and they were about to watch "Shawn of the Dead."
I have lots of remotes, but can't figure out how to play
a dvd. "The DaVinci Code" was on what turned out to be
a Christian focus channel - one ad was for a five day pray-
a-thon the station will be broadcasting next week, over-
lapping voting day and its aftermath. The ad breaks
were long and I ate a lot of mini KitKats and Baby Ruths,
not even tasting them - greedy, needy and insatiable.

And as the foreground greenery bows to Wizard Island, so Crater Lake stays the bluest skies you've ever seen. The lake doesn't change depth more than an inch or two every year, no inlet or outlet, nearly 2000' deep at the deepest point. When Mount Mazama blew nearly 7000 years ago the Klamaths saw it go, saw this caldera seal its sides by lava floes, fill with clear water.

White people, who have never allowed not knowing to interfere with aggressive action, stocked the lake, which had previously been home to virtually no living thing outside of bacteria, with lots and lots of fish. Brown trout, rainbow trout and some kind of salmon survive. Obviously nobody migrates to spawn. Populations are small as there isn't much to eat. (notice sudden escape from documentary tone.)

When we came here, Jim and I, 32 years ago, we walked from the lodge down to lake. The trail is gone. Rangers said there's a walkable trail on the northeast side of the lake, but we didn't drive over there to find it. We didn't even ask if there was a boat anymore to take tourists around Wizard Island. I like that the lake is that much less accessible to human messing about.

At school, we talked about rap. I wrote a rap draft yesterday morning, in the persona of a mythical upper middle class white person, possibly commander in chief, who knows. Here goes:

(It's a draft remember. I said it in front of the juniors, no beats, and those who looked back at me looked stricken, except one girl who said it was AWESOME, who is awesome, you are awesome Vanessa!):

Rap of Our Supremacy


We pound the wrong, who are in our way and brown,
we’re righteous, we’re free, they all want to be we.
The weak make us angry, let us take things away,
they pray so they say in their temples and mosques
pray to animals, the Milky Way – we don’t trust them
so we blow them away, we cage them and burn them,
make them do what we say. We remember the Alamo,
foxhole. Don’t point out Viet Nam or Gitmo - we gotta go
and take what we need. It isn’t greed like they spew
in their ignorant screed, claim we’re imperial in their
funereal attempts to save their puny ways. We don’t rue
what we do. If we’re wrong, we’d know it, forego it.

We’re the good ones, we’re virtuous and right
We believe what we’re told, we don’t misuse our might.
But we know when to throw our weight around
we’ve got the book of his word and we know who to pound.

No time to help the poor, fix our streets, give kids
something warm to eat, we gotta beat feet anywhere
you others dare to keep what you have, believe
you have the right to save yourselves and your weird
way of life. We come bearing gifts to heal your rifts,
commerce in drifts. You want what we have, we know
that you do – Gap, Target, MacDonalds, Kentucky Fried –
inside you want it, to be just like us, drive fast cars,
blot out the stars with traffic lights and all night bars.
You’ve got your fists around our oil. What could you
want with it? We’ve toiled – best workers in the world –
your hearts yearn for our stars and stripes way of life.

We’re the good ones, we’re virtuous and right
We believe what we’re told, we don’t misuse our might.
But we know when to throw our weight around
we’ve got the book of his word and we know who to pound.

You hate us cuz we’re free. Watch our TV, don’t believe
what you see. That brotha, he lies, don’t go to his neighborhood.
They’re not good, don’t do what they should. Their minds are wood!
You can’t teach them to change – they won’t forgive the past.
They won’t last, lower cast, oh those are vast. Forget them,
don’t let them pull you down, this is the wrong side of town.
Turn up the jams and put the hammer down. Don’t listen
till you’re far enough away they sound like sheep, such a relief,
they’ll come to grief – and deserve it. They kill each other,
can’t keep a lover, their beef’s just a cover. We don’t owe
them anything – let them mow our acre lawns, sprinklers on
in the dark in the draught – we’re not doing without.

We’re the good ones, we’re virtuous and right
We believe what we’re told, we don’t misuse our might.
But we know when to throw our weight around
we’ve got the book of his word and we know who to pound.

The rest of the world cowers. What should we do – offer
flowers? Please. You die of disease in ugly places, don’t
wash your faces or change your clothes. You blow your
noses in the street, walk over it in dusty feet. You’re
missing teeth, have no education, no sanitation, we can’t
respect your nation. – we have an obligation to perpetuate
our way of life – be a light unto the world and take
what you don’t know you have, and if you do, we’ll charm
you, disarm you, we never mean to harm your mothers
and your kids, your flimsy houses full of mice and lice.
How could you be nice? We don’t think twice. What’s to
understand? You’ve been neglected, we’ll neglect you.

We’re the good ones, we’re virtuous and right
We believe what we’re told, we don’t misuse our might.
But we know when to throw our weight around --
we’ve got the book of his word and we know who to pound.

We’re watching the news when the call comes in,
in midst of financial plummet, war and the election,
Bad connection, “Hey kids, It’s Dad.” Oh God.

-Laura Gamache
FIRST DRAFT, 10/28/08

Gotta go. SIX MORE DAYS! Believe that Obama will win, and that he will work for positive change in this country. I do. I believe. And I'm not a fool.

That's Mt. Theisen behind the Klamath Marsh in the photo.

Here I am in Chiloquin, Oregon, south of anywhere on the west coast I have previously called home, autumn in the high country, clear cold air, quaking aspen, three kinds of pine, lots of kinds of people, though their numbers are few. Chiloquin, population 720, according to my Oregon D.O.T. map.

While I've been gone, Seattle poets have gotten over themselves in a big way at Green Lake, standing in a line to tell passers by "I love you," a pile of poetry books on a chair nearby.

While I've been gone, Seattle's Conibear women's crew sent two fours to Boston, where they placed 4th and 7th in the highly competitive Head of the Charles regatta.

I've come here to get in touch with my inner poet, and make her come out and write.
And get organized already! Which is rather beyond her, so I've brought my inner Hun, who used to cox for Conibear, and she's still busy with getting her headgear on, so more on that.

I've come here to teach creative writing at Chiloquin High School two days a week. I'm working with 23 juniors, 32 sophomores and 13 middle school, oops junior high kids.

I've come here to curate an adult writer group, three sessions in Sprague River, four sessions in Chiloquin. The first Sprague River session was last night. Five writers, six counting me. We're launched. Sharing writing is a kind of liftoff. We all agreed the sessions provide deadlines. Our audience awaits our best work! Make time for it! I suggested everyone write down ten observations a day. These can go towards a piece of writing, or augment the other work you're doing. I quoted Henry James, not from the Golden Bowl, but what he said about the writer being a person upon whom nothing is lost.

I've come here to learn something about here. As Perry Chocktoot, Culture Director at the Klamath Tribes said to me two days ago, "You don't know where you are." I asked him to tell me, and he has started to do that.

I've come here to develop reading habits. I've read Buy the Chief a Cadillac, by a cowboy, I've read parts of Stories Along the Sprague, am nearly through The Echo Maker by Richard Price. I have read poetry out of published books and poetry by my students. I like a balance of seasoned work and work by sprouting writers - so that my ear doesn't turn tin. The aspens are turning - leaves swivelling, and going golden. I began accumulating books my first weekend at the local bookstore, half of the Chiloquin Art Center across the street from the grocery store that has a liquor store in a closet straight back from the entry door. Last weekend I went to Portland to be with my Bookarina friends and had the dt's for Powell's. My friend Susan and I wandered the purple, orange, pink and other colored sections of the store. I think poetry is blue, so I spent a lot of time there - I don't look for color, I follow my worn path to get there. Oh, I bought books. I bought a few $1 books, there are sections throughout the store, for the Chiloquin School Library. I gave them to the librarian, along with some I'd brought from home. The books she turned away, Haydn took. Not Haydn the dead composer, Haydn the very alive young teacher I'm working with at the high school.

I came here to write, and I'm writing. I'm writing about my teaching, which is halting as the teaching hasn't found its footing yet. We are not within our flow as yet, my writing about my teaching is a boat I haven't quite gotten my butt to the seat of yet.

I came here to be away from home, to be out of sorts, alien, to look homeward into myself. This is going on. The first couple of nights I was jittery with nothing to do and nobody to be with. It is odd that there's no little cafe to hang out in here. There's no real dependable day to day sit down and jaw with your neighbors place. No wonder the different groups - so far I understand ranchers, Native folks, new transplants with high ideals and money. There's the new community center, where I sit in the library typing. It houses a gallery, the CVIP (Chiloquin Visions in Progress) and the sheriff's department probation officer. There's a Friday night Teen thing happening I think, though I do not KNOW this as a solid given.

Time is a different entity here - I don't trust my pace yet, am still holding back, holding out, unsure of what the hell I'm doing. I keep going. I don't stop. I would like to flow and soar, but that is never an all the time thing. I am a community resource here. I was shocked to discover the writers had not seen each other (the adult writers) since Ellie was here last year. I think I have a mission to help them learn to continue their group in between writing residencies without the group devolving - I have ideas how this could happen - certainly meeting no more frequently than once a month, having a rotating roster of group leaders presenting out of different writing resources. Keeping the same rules as when the writer is here, and in anticipation of the next annual writer visit.