Saturday, June 24, 2006

So long, P-town poets

Workshop ended yesterday. As always, a bit sad to see it end. More than a bit. I always meet such good people at these things, and we always make staying-in-touch promises which 90% of the time are not even remotely going to be kept. (Not because anyone's a bad person or wouldn't like to stay in touch -- it's just that people go back to their normal lives, get busy, etc.)

(If any of you guys googled me and found this -- hi! welcome! leave a comment or drop me an email ... I miss ya already!)

It is funny how my relationship with Provincetown has changed now that I'm coming here for workshops and not just as a tourist. I feel like I have a community here. All week I saw people I knew, everywhere. I felt like a part of something. Now that I've moved over to a B&B for my last two nights and most of last week's workshoppers have gone home, it feels like a different town, and I don't like it as much.

The good news is that I spoke with both Dorothy (education coordinator and one of the nicest people on the planet) and Hunter (director of the Fine Arts Work Center) and they are definitely working on getting a low-residency MFA writing program off the ground. They will be partnering with another institution, as they have for their visual arts MFA -- most likely either Bennington or Sarah Lawrence. And it should get going within the next two years.

Yes, I'm applying. How can I not?

(I will apply to other places too, of course. One should never put all one's eggs in one basket, even if it's a very nice basket. Which reminds me, I want to go to Cafe Heaven in the morning for an omelet...)

The other good news is that I was offered a letter of recommendation which should carry a fair amount of weight. That makes me happy.

So sometime in the next few days I'll blog about the workshop itself and share the exercises that we were given. They were good ones. I don't always do well with exercises. Although I'm not crazy about everything I came up with for these, I think they were all productive and useful for me, and I will probably try several of them again.

* * * * *

Today was my all day whale watch. Other than the fact that the weather sucked about as much as it could suck without actually having the trip cancelled (rain, fog, rain, cold, and rain), it was fun. We traveled up north to Jeffreys Ledge, off the coast of Maine, and got some good close looks at a number of whales -- humpbacks, finbacks, and minke whales.

And now I'm tired and increasingly non-verbal, so I think I will just fart around online for a while (I am behind on EVERYthing) and fall asleep early.

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