Edgar Allen Pot Pourri

I am bogged down in an editing job that never seems to end. This is not a book I would normally be reading, but I do enjoy immersing myself in a realm I normally wouldn't pay attention to. This one is just so damn goofy.

Gil Adamson's launch at Type a couple weeks back was great: normally Anansi puts on these overblown, star-studded affairs, but this one was homey and friendly and Gil-like. Her novel, The Outlander, is already getting an enormous amount of attention, which it deserves (though I haven't finished reading it yet!). Don't know why the reviewers all seem so obsessed with its genre aspects.

Last week was the send-off party for Sandra and Megan, who have absconded to Scotland. A very lovely night on the back patio of Cadillac Lounge. I'm glad that Sandra did so many readings before she left, because I know she reached a whole new audience with her new book, and introduced her already-audience to very new things she's doing.

I have to finish my own goddamn novel. I think August will open up a few possibilities for that. Thinking of spending a few extra days in Ottawa to write when I go there to read at the Ottawa Folk Festival mid-month.

Tom Walmsley showed me 100 haiku he's written lately. Many of them are amazing; cumulatively they are amazing. They sound like haiku while sounding like Walmsley. I'm hoping to get a couple of pages of them into This.

There's the sense that I should be doing nothing but writing. Why can't I make that happen for myself?

Most excited about Ben Walker's project around my old poems. He's put 11 of them into song settings now, often with some radical rearranging and occasional rewriting of the lines. I love it. I've listened to the demos over and over and over. It's like new life being injected into things I wrote, in some cases, two decades ago. It's like the poems have a new home. We're talking about making a CD for this fall. This excites me more than anything about my own writing at the moment.

Spent a week obsessing about going back to school for an MFA in creative writing. It's not something I've wanted to do, but there are certain realities I have to face. Gone are the days when a writer could get hired to teach at a college or university based on his/her publishing history. And I do want to teach more. People who take my workshops want me to teach more. So I will apply for an MFA programme for fall 2008.

I said to a friend, "But I'll be 51 when I graduate!" And he said, "You'll be 51 anyways, with or without the degree."

Over and out.