I took off the snowy background because it just seemed too wintry for the way I'm feeling, although I remind myself that in many years we've had our most sever winter weather after the 25th of February. It's bright but windy today. Wednesday is trash day in Woodridge and I can hear people's empty trash cans and recycling containers rolling around in the street. Temperatures are supposed to continue dropping through today, with some precipitation due to begin tomorrow and last through Friday morning. This is probably not a call to clear the shelves at the Giant of bread and milk, but it's a reminder that spring is not around the corner, but a considerable way down the road.

Those are cliched metaphors, the kind I'm learning more and more to strip from my writing. I'm back in writing class, this time "English 108 -- Advanced Creative Writing," again meeting on Tuesday nights, and with the regular teacher, Terry Wallace, recovered from his sudden heart surgery and restored to us.

There are twelve of us this time, meeting in a history classroom outfitted with tables arranged in a U-shape. I like this setup much more than the conventional student desks, which are too small a surface for all the stuff I pile in front of me for a class and which have to be dragged into a ragged circle for the kind of work we do. The room has a moveable wall, a trendy feature of school architecture when this building was designed, which of course is never moved to enlarge the space but is thinner than a real wall. Next door is a music appreciation class and over these three weeks that we've been meeting we've heard Gregorian chant, some Vivaldi, and last night the Hallelujah Chorus. It's an interesting and not unpleasant backdrop.

There is something about being in a formal class which energizes me and pushes me to get more and more serious about writing. It occurred to me on the first night that last semester I didn't do enough work, didn't take advantage of the opportunity that was there. Part of it was the terrible funk I was in because of my physical problems, and part of it was the sudden changes we had to endure because Mr. Wallace got sick. The college took heroic steps to provide continuity, and the chief replacement instructor gave her task more than an adequate effort, but the situation was disruptive and something was lost.

And, perhaps most important, part of it was me. I didn't take myself and the opportunity I had seriously enough. This semester I'm determined to make the most of every single class, to submit something new or revised every week so I'll have the benefit of this extraordinary teacher's input, and to take risks and do something new with my writing.

Doing something new requires that I get rid of a lot of old. Two weeks ago I looked at the book shelves in my study and the boxes of teaching and reference material that occupy way too much floor space there. I have every single "how to write [insert genre]" guide available over the last ten years, books of exercises designed to silence your internal critic, tap your inner wisdom, write shapely fiction, lively poems, compelling essays. I also have several cartons of clipped articles, intact issues of Writer's Digest, Poets & Writers, folders with notes, ideas, fragments, false starts, worse endings.

And guess what. The guyidebooks and advice articles all say the same thing. They're like the women's magazines -- how many recipes for baked chicken or strategies for clipping and organizing coupons do you need anyway? The magazines endure (and serve a useful purpose) because there is always a new generation of beginners for whom the advice is news.

I came to understand that having all that old stuff around, all the stuff that was useful when I was a teacher in need of resources for individualizing instruction, is draining my energy. It takes energy to store, maintain, and just be aware of all that stuff. I'm at the stage where I have to follow the dictum in the Nike ads: Just Do It! And one of the things to do is start getting rid of stuff I don't need and won't ever use.

But there is a wealth of material there, even if it's no longer valuable for me. I can't just throw it away. Last week I took several issues of writing magazines to class. Last night I took more, as well as two books, one a basic guide to writing short stories and another about basic poetics. My classmates eagerly took most of what I brought. The magazines that were left I took over to the writing teacher's classroom we used last semester.

I feel lighter, more focused, ready to complete a short story, polish it, and send it to a particular contest I WANT to win by March 31. Wish me luck.