I adore this photograph for the possibilities it holds--that there really is nothing on either side of that little shack for miles. That it stands completely alone. But the cheery blue sky, the warm wheat-like grass are offering comfort, they're promising to take care of whomever lives inside there.

And it's in a state with which I have a near fetishistic fasicnation --Montana.

It makes me want to write a story about it, about some crazy, determined old-school couple who have been married for sixty years and raised eleven children in that little shack and survived the coldest winters on record, and ate off the grain and cattle they'd raised the years prior. They'd be tough and seem, on the surface, as though they didn't love each other, because they wouldn't be tender with each other in those touchy-feely ways, only they'd finish each other's sentences, and that time he had a heart attack she drove the thirty miles of rough roads there and back through a bad snow storm to get the doc out there. This is the kind of couple who dies within days of one another, for without each other, what else is there? Just the meadows and the strange open vista of sky, and there's more of that kind of stuff after death, so might as well go.

Last night I read at Zebulon's as part of a trio, involving Cydney Chadwick and Geri Digiorno (Sonoma County's new Poet Laureate). It was fun. The best things about it?
-Not Emceeing for once
-Not worrying about microphone testing and where the music stand was
-Not caring if it started on time
-The actual reading part. I like reading words aloud. When they happen to be my words, I know what I meant, so that makes it easier to read them.

It was nice just to be invited, not in charge. I had recently lamented to one of my friends that no one invites me to read, as if, by dint of starting the LiveWire series, I was somehow claiming I didn't need invites. I may get another chance, too. I've made it into the Dickens Literary Review, the publication produced by Copperfield's books each year. This means I am in the running for a $500 fiction prize. I find out on December 3rd.

JPR