I haven’t posted here in a while, but my mind has been so consumed with other projects that I simply don’t have a thought to spare for blogging. This is due, in large part, to the fact that I’m actively writing nonfiction for the first time in my life, which is siphoning away all the material I’d normally reserve for my blog. Sorry, blog. Sorry, blog readers. But also, I’m not sorry because I’m writing, and I will never be sorry about that.

But I do love this blog, and so to appease it (and its readers), I thought I’d post a montage of the different things I’m working on and thinking about and obsessed with right now. Ready? Okay, let’s go.

I. A line from my first new short story in months (years?), which is called “Enough”: “I still didn’t speak about what had changed. I tried, but the words stayed lodged in my throat, like a vitamin that wouldn’t wash down.”

II. A picture of the autumn leaves, taken a couple of weeks ago, as the leaves are now falling off the trees in droves:

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

III. A line from my big nonfiction project: “Last winter, I became obsessed with the river because I needed to see something constant and moving. I often walked there after work, when I was tired and worn, and I resented the long trudge home in the dark. I am always going too far.”

IV. A poem I can’t stop thinking about called “To the Harbormaster” by Frank O’Hara:

I wanted to be sure to reach you;
though my ship was on the way it got caught
in some moorings. I am always tying up
and then deciding to depart. In storms and
at sunset, with the metallic coils of the tide
around my fathomless arms, I am unable
to understand the forms of my vanity
or I am hard alee with my Polish rudder
in my hand and the sun sinking. To
you I offer my hull and the tattered cordage
of my will. The terrible channels where
the wind drives me against the brown lips
of the reeds are not all behind me. Yet
I trust the sanity of my vessel; and
if it sinks, it may well be in answer
to the reasoning of the eternal voices,

the waves which have kept me from reaching you.

V. A quote from Theodore Ziolkowski’s Modes of Faith: Secular Surrogates for Lost Religious Belief, which I’m using in a paper I’m writing about transference of worship: “But for every appetite there is a cook whose secret recipe stills the hunger….Every age and every land brings forth prophets of an irrational salvation.”

VI. Another picture of leaves and sky:

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAVII. A line from an essay I’m writing about finding the line between my imaginary world and reality: “The notion that we somehow ‘own’ time is ludicrous. Time is a gift, and we can do nothing more than be good stewards of the moments that are given to us.”