Beach with dot
This week my husband was deleting photos from his phone and sent me the picture below in an email called “you on beach.” A more accurate description might be “beach with dot.” He took the photo last April in Maine, where it was definitely not beach season.
Nor is it beach season where I am, holed up at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, wrestling with a new novel that is—as they say in the law—“inchoate.” (Is a novel ever choate?) In southern Virginia, it is muddy and slushy and a nondescript shade of gray. And beautiful.
I’m thinking about metaphor, and feeling like a dot in a beautiful place. Diminished and daunted and overwhelmed. That’s probably okay and possibly good.
Jeff Rutherford recently posted my interview with him for the Reading and Writing Podcast where we discussed THREE MUSES and other books. You can listen here.
Here’s my new book review for NPR about Jeff Hobbs’s CHILDREN OF THE STATE: Stories of Hope and Survival in the Juvenile Justice System. You don’t need me to tell you that America’s criminal system is rife with injustice at every level. Juvenile justice is a bright-ish dot, in that we put fewer kids in cages than we used to, which is a woefully low bar. Hobbs tries to humanize the system by spending time with the children in its web, and with the adults who are trying to help.
That’s what I got.
Be well.
Love, Martha