This is what poetry is (says the Road),
a laying down of uniform pattern
across a land you can't control
but which you think it best to flatten.
        -- Lisa Williams
            "Road" -- Poetry, April 2001

Well, I've done it. I have actually completed a story, taken it through workshop, and even been so bold as to mail it off to my favorite journal (an exercise in chutzpah, to be sure). The mailing it off was premature, I think. I know it could stand some fine tuning. My tutor says to put it in your bottom drawer now, let it cool, and maybe in July or so get it out again and look at it with fresh eyes.

All of the writing books say that. Often I'll come to an exercise that requires working on a section of a story that's been cooling in that bottom drawer, looking at pacing or foreshadowing or some other aspect of craft. I was always dismayed at the suggestion. I didn't have any stuff in my bottom drawer, nothing remotely resembling a finished piece, just paragraphs, passages, scenes, character outlines.

There is a box in the basement that has some old old writing in it. I once followed a suggestion that counselled boxing up all the stuff that was keeping you tied up, and starting fresh. Work only on new things. You could open the box again in a year, when anything that was salvageable would be uncovered by your new eyes. It's been down there for two or three now, and I think, finally, it's time for a look.

It's National Poetry Month, anyway. (I'm not sure if there's a National Fiction Month.) I've often said that I wrote poetry until I learned how hard it was to do it well. That was some time in college, and for the next twenty-five years I did indeed write nothing but academic and professional stuff, certainly nothing "creative." During my famous epiphany in December of 1999, when I realized I was still "workin' for the man every night and day," I embarked on another serious effort to write poetry.

I'm not writing that much of it, (it's still too hard to do it right, do it well), but I'm reading a lot of it and I think that is helping to get me moving on my fiction. There's poetry in that box in the basement as well. Suddenly, I'm kind of excited about what I might discover.

When I was a Girl Scout I acquired a pen pal, a "Girl Guide" in England.* We corresponded for a little more than five years. By then I had started college and she had become engaged. One of the last things I sent her was a set of pillowcases I had embellished with a ruffle, some ribbon, and a bit of embroidery. It was for her "bottom drawer," the place where she was collecting the items she would need to set up her household as she moved into her new life.

I've got something to put into my "bottom drawer" of writing, and some stuff in the bottom most part of my house that might benefit from a fresh look. It's spring, and I'm ready to blossom.

* Her name was Valerie Old, she lived in Northampton, and in 1967 (1966?) she married a man named Nigel Sismey or Sismay. Ring a bell with anyone?