The
other day my editor’s assistant at Bloomsbury asked me how many more books I
had in me. This got me thinking about my life as a writer. I retired a little
bit at a time, first on a “bridge” program and then doing some teaching as
piecework, but now I’m out of the game. That’s OK most of the time, but classes
have started at Knox without me, and that’s a little sad. For years I relied on
teaching as an important and even necessary source of meaningful work. But now
I’m on my own as a writer. So far so good, but for the first time in years I
don’t have a novel in progress. There’s still work to be done on The Confessions of Frances Godwin, and
I’ve finished a novella (very hard to sell, as my agent reminded me, though he
hasn’t read it yet), but there’s nothing big coming up on the horizon.
“Just
live,” I tell myself, and that’s what I tried to do this weekend. I read; I
went to an excellent reading by Peter Orner, I played my guitar and recorded a
Doc Watson song and, after years of trying, got it to sound the way I wanted it
to sound; I cooked down ten pounds of tomatoes and made sauce. This sauce is so
good that we hoard it and in fact still have tomato sauce left from last year.
And now Sunday morning, I’m writing down these thoughts about writing. Maybe
that’s what I’ll do. Write about writing, and maybe even write about writing
about writing, as I’m doing right now.
Put
on a turtle neck this morning for the first time since last winter. Feels good.
Fall is the best time for a writer. Not too hot, not too cold. Maybe I’ll try
to be like Raymond Carver. Here’s the end of a Carver poem that I say to myself
every morning as I’m in the shower:
I hate to seem greedy–I have so much
to be thankful for already.
But I want to get up early one more
morning, at least,
And go to my place with some coffee
and wait
Just wait, to see what’s going to
happen.
My lovely wife has already made the coffee. It’s in a
thermos on the kitchen counter.