The plan is this: I am returning to a short piece from a fiction workshop last spring and letting it spread like fungus in whatever form it decides to take, be that as a cycle of stories, a novella, little windows into a world or one big rollicking road with many potholes and detours (my soon-to-be advisor calls this undertaking my "novel" but I am loathe to reach for big titles until they are deserved); I am keeping a process diary that will most likely take the form of the aforementioned instruction poems, a manual, if you will, for how to be a writer/human being; I am going to make recordings of both the prose and poetry at the end of the journey, an auditory record, an homage to bedtime stories and family folktales, a nod to all my slam life. Now, I'm not saying this plan is rigid. I am no mason, and therefore do not trade in brick walls. Every piece of this is movable, transformable (and hopefully transformative), and necessary.
All my anxiety about this transition came down to one specific, rather unwieldly, point -- I was worried that one of the things I love so dearly would have to be lost in the translation of my love of writing to a workable project. Sacrificing poetry for the sake of prose was a concept that never sat well with me, and still doesn't, so it's exciting to know that I have space for both, and for many aspects of both to play and interchange and enjoy one another and feed one another.
All of this gushing comes in the wake of meeting with my fiction mentor. In about half an hour, I have a meeting with her poetry counterpart of sorts to talk out the poetic side of all this. I'll probably be back here after, gushing about ideas more fully-formed and discussed, exciting "perfectly realized moments" where all of the pieces interlock like zipper teeth gritted against the winter cold that's hanging over Amherst this morning.
