progress, it exists

I love this quote from Lorrie Moore’s “How to Become a Writer”:

“Decide that you like college life. In your dorm you meet many nice people. Some are smarter than you. And some, you notice, are dumber than you. You will continue, unfortunately, to view the world in exactly these terms for the rest of your life.”

No, no context, I just like it 🙂

progress report:

I finished my short story this week – beginning, middle, end, and done. I’ll probably be nagging people to read it for me some time this week.

Last weekend, I wrote a bunch of stuff for my novel, and it’s currently sitting at a homely but endearing 21,000 words.

I wrote this, which might be a poem, but is probably not… (this is not a poem, I see scrawled in my memory, across my attempts from old college workshops).

I blame it on Courtney, because she wrote a poem this week. Hers is a real, actual poem.

Inexistence

It doesn’t exist. You might think it does. You remember it,
this thing you fashioned with your own mind and hands –
it’s a story, it’s a photograph, it’s an organic hot dog,
nested carefully in its bun and sliced into perfect half moons.

It wasn’t reality, where you placed it, in another
dimension, another consciousness, another lifetime.
Maybe you accidentally left it in that place
with all the lost socks, that damn wine cork,
and the TV remote.

That’s why you’re the only one who can see it.
Because you can see it. Because it is there,
but at the same time, if no one else sees it,
it’s kind of not.