Busy Two Weeks Ahead

Events erupt into best laid plans, as the poet Robert Burns once noted. The next two weeks are going to be wild, for at least two reasons.

One is a good one – the grandbaby is scheduled to arrive, officially on March 16 but possibly earlier; the signs are that the baby will be of a good size. The grandparents-to-be can barely stand the waiting. The mother-to-be is long past the point of standing the waiting, but she is hanging in there.

The other reason is work – a mega-project will be occurring for the next two weeks and I’ll likely be buried.

So, I’ve actually been trying to plan and get some work done ahead of time – several posts for here; two poetry book reviews; the final installment of contributions to the “Why Poetry Matters” series over at TweetSpeak Poetry; a book review of Watch Over Me, a novel by Christa Parrish; two articles for The High Calling Blogs; and a blog post about an Edouard Manet painting for Christian Manifesto. We also have a poetry jam on Twitter scheduled for this Tuesday, March 2, at 9:30 eastern time.

I also got everything together for our tax filings. I know it's "render unto Caesar what is Caesar's," but there has to be a better way to do that than the Missouri state income tax forms.

It’s been a productive time for writing. In addition to what I mentioned above, I’ve also been working on two writing projects for others, one on the author Athol Dickson and one on Wendell Berry’s poetry volume entitled Leavings: Poems (Berry, by the way, also had a new short story in a recent issue of Oxford American magazine). I’ve also got an idea in my head for a writing project about the Mississippi River – using old and new memoirs, travelogues and novels to show how the river helps frame an understanding of ourselves. (The only question is where should it find a home.) And I’ve been doing considerable blogging for work, both for the official corporate blog and our employee intranet.

Someone asked me what’s sitting on the nightstand, waiting to be read. I’m in the throes of River Rising by Athol Dickson (connected to that writing project). Right behind it are a slender volume called Roualt/Fujimura: Soliloquies by Thomas Hibbs (and a “refraction” by Makoto Fujimura); a book of poems called Pencil Drawn and Paper Grown by Heather Truett, who’s joined us on our Twitter poetry jams; two love story collections by author Travis Thrasher (one of which was not easy to find); and three books about either the environment, technology or both: Eric Brende’s Better Off, Pete Dunne’s Prairie Spring, and Eagle Pond by Donald Hall.

So much to read,
so much to write,
so little time.
And then there’s that
grandbaby coming. Did I
mention that?