Waiting in the Reno Airport

The shuttle dropped me here at 1. I'm on my way home from Squaw Valley Community of Writers. If you ever have a chance to attend, do. It's a rare experience. Each writer in attendance is expected to bring a new poem to workshop/meeting every day. Bob Hass, on the first day, making quotation marks in the air as he spoke, referred to SVCW as "Poetry Boot Camp."

I had my doubts, worried that I might be entering a culture of inexplicable praise, but it was highly effective, the right amount of pressure combined with the right amount of help and well-thought out praise.

I'm lucky to have a good writing community where I live, but truly, Squaw Valley was a completely different kind of nexus. I've never been at the confluence of so many talented poets all of them urging one another forward to the brink of the poem, and on.

For a week we most of us lived and wrote in a large Squaw Valley resort house. The house where I lived for a week housed nine poets. In no particular order, my housemates for the week were: Ted Lardner, Jolie Clark, Greg Randall, Eliza Rotterman, Jill Bergantz, Steve Masamilla, Sara Wallace, and Zanni Schauffler. Primo Primavera also made an appearance. Their presence made me a better writer. I've rarely had such a productive week of writing. If I were a better person, I would have been more emphatic in thanking each of them for the help they gave me.

In fact, this has been one hell of a good summer. In Lincoln, at the Nebraska Writers' Conference, I finally came to understand the way poetry books are supposed to work, and there I also made some new friends, good writers all. Don, Stella, Nancy, Howard, Todd, Suzanne, Ann, thank you guys, too!