doesn’t that sound just right?  i can’t tell you how much the thought of books + tea without end cheers me.

i’m listening to Pride and Prejudice.  Darcy just proposed to Lizzie, and she refused him!  imagine!

i’l be finishing up Desiring the Kingdom and Invention of Wings.

starting a Harriet Vane mystery.

 working through What Color Is Your Parachute? and maybe Let Your Life Speak (i’m especially interested in some Quaker wisdom after Invention of Wings!)

and maybe The Muses Among Us as the mood strikes…this is the first week that i’ll be bringing pages of the revised novel to my writing group.  oh no!

on this late January Poetry Friday, a picture of my own grandmother, Nadine Ellen West. and a poem from the epigraph of The Muses Among Us: Eloquent Listening and Other Pleasure of the Writer’s Craft.  returning to this treasure house of a book looking for inspiration + direction as i revise.

Kinds of Writers by Kim Stafford

Emily distilling spent days

into an attar of verse.  Or Basho: bamboo.

Or St. Francis, living the life that commands others

to tell his stories.  Or a Bard with a mind like mossy

shelves heavy with tales.  Or Anansi, spinning creation.

Rumi and Rama spinning spirit.  Or Walt Whitman’s

mother, to bear such a child.  Scheherazade, telling

stories for life, night by night.  Or Homer, whose life-

work of two poems is enough.  Or on the mountain,

singer of the Song of Songs.  Yes, I prefer anonymous–

her naked, indelible call.  Your own grandmother softly

putting you to sleep with a hum.  Or best of all,

someone we have not yet read, someone wide-eyed,

big-hearted, listening among us now, whose fist

can barely hold a pen.

more Poetry Friday goodness can be found this week at A Teaching Life.

…and Viking paper dolls from another Nadene.

and having poems and Vikings, let us be therewith content.