I know I have been a recluse recently: shutting off my email, not answering my phone, missing all your shows, but, as many of you know, I've been working on a grant application. So, to share a bit with you and break out of my reclusive pattern, I am posting a couple of the responses here.
One essay asked for a response about what your writing means to you, and another was a personal response to a quote from Virginia Woolf's, A Room of Her Own, which the award is based on. If I get the grant it would allow me time to write my book and offer some validation.
As many of you know, I am in the middle of a divorce and my "late night poetry events" and "out of town protests" are being used as examples of my cruel and intolerable treatment of my former partner and of my neglect of my children. So, this kind of validation (both in being chosen and in being funded) would be amazing.
I like to think that when one door closes another opens (to be cliche about it) or that the universe is always offering us gifts and we just need to be open to them, from the smallest to the largest things in life, everything is a gift: our very existence is a gift. But as (who was it that said this? Alexander Graham Bell? I think) said, about the door thing "we often look so long upon the door that has closed behind us that we don't see the doors that have opened in front of us," or something to that point.
I am grateful for everyone and everything in my life and I am trying to be open to all the universe has to offer me. This seems like it would be such an easy thing to do, but I have found it is actually quite hard. We have so many defenses and issues and complications that staying open to possibility is a conscious struggle. But it is worth it, after all.
I think it was Abe Lincoln who said, "I don't want to get to the end of my life and only have lived the length of it, I want to have lived the depth and breadth as well." Yeah ... me too.
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