Gwen drove her Prowler to the fellowship this morning, so winter must be gone. Daffodils and Gwen's Prowler are signs that winter has passed.

I can't imagine owning such a toy myself (or being able to afford such a toy). In other groups, Gwen might have been subjected to some criticisms for this apparently frivolous purchase, but she is known among the Unitarians for taking care of important things first.

Gwen is over seventy, but she still parks her car next to mine in the lot at the bottom of the hill instead of in the small lot at the top of the hill, so that other infirm members of the fellowship won't have to make the long climb to the fellowship building.

I hope she doesn't put any door dings in my Metro.

My own writing has been feeling more than a little thin lately, so when I'm not enjoying the spring's new writing on my part of the planet, I've been reading other writers that I enjoy. Prompted by my participation in a Sunday program on poetry at the fellowship, I've been reading William Stafford's essays, specifically those in the book named in the left column.

Now there's the refuge of a fraud and a scoundrel: When you can't write, then read about it.

Stafford offers many observations on writing that I enjoyed, and I'll excerpt just a few of them below. In the arts, so many of our justifications are simple assertions, lacking the rigorous inquiry and proofs that would follow a scientific argument, but Stafford makes his observations seem intuitively true.

Or at least useful. Or smarmily comforting.

Anyway, I recognize some of what he writes about in these words snipped from various of his essays.

Poetry is the kind of thing you have to see from the corner of your eye. You can be too well prepared for poetry. A conscientious interest in it is worse than no interest at all....It's like a very faint star. If you look straight at it you can't see it, but if you look a little to one side it is there.

A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them. That is, he does not draw on a reservoir; instead, he engages in an activity that brings to him a whole succession of unforeseen stories, poems, essays, plays, laws, philosophies, religions...

...in [the] poetry [workshop] we were always within a syllable or two of something overwhelming...

Reading:
Writing the Australian Crawl: Views on the Writer's Vocation, by William Stafford