10/50

1. I made curry this weekend, and nan.
2. I had coffee by the fire.
3. I practiced "Unchained Melody" on my keyboard.
4. I watched three episodes of The Sopranos.
5. I was very disturbed by two of the episodes because characters were killed that I had come to care about.
6. The two disturbing episodes keep turning in my brain.
7. It snowed over the weekend. A very pretty snow. But it remained very cold until Sunday. Sunday was a little warmer.
8. I didn't work on my new short story, but I thought about it a whole lot.

9/50

1. On Sunday night Allen and I went to a Bluegrass Jam at El Camino Real restaurant in Toledo.
2. I worked on a new story last night, writing by hand in a composition book. I filled 10 pages.
3. I received a wonderful letter from France. It was from Liz, a former student. That is Liz, kneeling next to the grave, in the video on my sidebar. If I get permission from her, I will share parts of her letter.
4. I just saw that Heath Ledger, age 28, has died.

8/50

We Think by Feeling, What is there to Know? (Theodore Roethke)

There must be different qualities of feeling. There is a kind of feeling which is unthinking, immediate, such as what happens when we are manipulated and give in to jingoistic tendencies.

I know there is a quality of feeling that can cause a sort of blindness: love can be like that. It must be why the ancients compared it to the moon, luna, lunatic. It makes one totally unreasonable and vulnerable. Anger can cause blindness and tragedy, so can its cousin, jealousy.

But there *is* a quality of feeling, which is more like intuition, perhaps, which I believe is almost synonymous with the imagination, that mysterious force authors have talked about for centuries. This is the kind of feeling Roethke sought to tap into, that vast river of feeling that connects us to the cosmos. To "think" with this kind of "feeling" is to be whole, connected, intuitive, and spirit-filled. It is the quality of feeling I seek and hope to be guided by.

7/50

Collecting stories.

Humans, like crows, are inclined to collect things. Stamps, bottles, butterflies, bugs. Stories. We have our personal stories, of course, Aunt Millie finding love or Uncle Bill getting drunk every Christmas. The time I fell into my mother's washbucket.

What I mean is published stories, those we collect in book form, those we take from the shelf when we ache for wholeness. We collect stories because we love them. We remember the adrenaline rush we received when we first read them. We collect stories because we are human, because we are like the crows. We decorate our nests with stories. We cock our heads, like crows, admiring our obsession. We know that inside the story, all is well.

Given the truth of this, I wonder how anybody talks about a story without her heart bursting from joy.

6/50

What about my writing? I have three stories out for consideration. I spent time over Christmas break thinking about my new novel; I also wrote several pages that I liked. I started a new story. For me it is always a matter of balancing the teaching, the learning, and the writing. It is about letting experience and memory accumulate so that it spills over into story. I am in the trenches right now. I am doing the dirty work.