A little short of sleep, but went out for a short run at 6am and felt better. At the beach, I run to landmarks, in Portland I count city blocks, but here I run purely for time—measuring my slow ten-minute miles. Gary is coming to see me this morning, and I am ridiculously excited about that. I don’t think I have slept without him since I left this program in 2007. I have managed to make my own coffee, but miss the conversation. I miss him.

The weather forecast was for 63° and “partly sunny” at 8am, but it was already 68° and not a cloud by at that time, so I’m thinking a hot day.

This morning’s craft talk was by Laura Warrell, “the struggle and The Struggle: Plumbing the Depths in Our Writing.” The woman has a sense of humor and a powerful speaking voice, so I expected to be entertained. I got that, but also a gift to keep: a strategy, a new way of looking not at conflict or plot but at character and a character’s struggle. She said her own books are concerned about relationships between women and men because that is what concerned her. “What is your struggle? How does it show up in your work? How does knowing this inform your writing? Natasha Tretheway’s step-father killed her mother when she was six, which was not something she talked much about. When her writing earned her attention, she realized that this fact of her life was showing up in bios and realized she needed to come to terms, to write about that, that it her struggle with that fact of her life needed to come out on the page. Laura urges writers to identify their personal struggles, to recognize how their characters or the persona they have created to tell a story or poem embodies their own (the writer’s) struggles. “Give your characters your traumas, insights, issues, illnesses… Tell the truest story you can; embrace uncertainty (of not knowing); silence the external voices (such as audience or the market); and embrace struggle. Struggle is the story. Struggle is what your story is about; it is what you are about. [Not character, certainly not plot, not even the much-lauded “conflict.”] Struggle shoves writing at its very base, embrace it. “Poke the wound.” There was more.

This morning, Scott Korb announced the death of Jack Driscoll, whose daughter had emailed to tell him. Jack left this earth at four in the morning, just as birds began singing. He was my third term advisor, and remains a generous and insightful, kind and cheerful soul in my memory. The convention is to say “rest in peace,” but I prefer to think of Jack driving off in a car, something huge and American and right out of one of his stories, because he put it there out of love.

There were faculty-led classes this afternoon, so I went off with my husband. [I have Ellen’s juxtaposition exercises to work on later.]

The evening’s readings were by Ellen Bass who read poems by herself and her co-author from a stunning and hand-stitched chapbook and new work; Mollie Gloss read a short maybe-ghost story from Unforeseen; and Kellie Wells read from a new work about Crones and necromancy and various oddities that had the audience laughing.

I’ve deleted the photos, but kept the cation below. It’s well past my bedtime.

At left, a few weeks ago on way up to the Rose Garden in Portland for a run around the budding roses. At right, the other day in Forest Grove after the morning craft talk and before the linden tree, with branches hanging low enough to stick my face into.