I don’t know if you can ever really tame your dragons. More likely you can come to peace within yourself and learn to accept a certain amount of turmoil when you stir up their nest. What am I talking about? Well, coming thousands of miles across the country and ending up in a cabin in the woods, a rustic cabin, without phone or internet, and me without a car, well, that got my dragons out and roaring. I’ve spent three out of five nights at the Holiday Inn Express and Liza and I were on the brink of making like trees and “leafing” this morning because we were having such a difficult time sleeping and focusing on our work. We decided to check out one last option…the Garden Cabin, which has a very large room and a small “apartment” in the back with a bedroom, kitchen and bath. We decided to give it a go and unloaded our bags once more and rearranged the furniture, setting up a futon bed for me in the big room and settling Liza in the back. With that settled we’re hoping to get back to honing in on our writing.

I’ve been working on compiling and organizing my essays and have enjoyed seeing them all again, like old friends, reminding me of the times and the places when they were conceived. I have a lot of affection for these writings. They feel like a conversation I was having with friends, working out what was difficult or joyous or curious or infuriating. I can see in them where I speak authentically and where I can tend toward more of a stiff, prosaic voice. I just got through reading the book, If You Want to Write by Brenda Ueland. I’ve had it on my bookshelf for at least five years (a recommendation from a friend when I first started writing) and pulled it out last week just before I left, thinking it would be inspiring to take it with me this week. Ms. Ueland was a strong and independent woman who taught writing to “regular folks” and reveled in seeing how when someone spoke true to their own way of being, how alive and engaging their writing was for the reader. She loudly and clearly denounces academic writers who make their work complicated and convoluted, not telling their stories from the heart, but from the head. I felt she spoke so directly to my own misgivings and have now put her right up there as one of my muses along the journey of creating this manuscript. I highly recommend this book for writers–beginning, intermediate and especially, advanced.

Rock House, where meals and laundry and phone are. The first night we went to dinner we were swarmed by thousands of lady bugs right at the front steps. It was a warm day and they must have hatched. By the next day they were all dead.

Liza & I in Rock House catching up on email.

On Friday night we had an impromptu get together. I read one of my essays and a couple of poems and Kathy (below) did a presentation of one of her pieces (she’s a storyteller, writer and actress) about the women of the South during the Civil War, spoken with their own words. It was really wonderful.

It’s high color season here in the Southern Appalachians. I took some photos of the local landscape and even though a couple of them are a bit hazy, you can see how absolutely stunning Autumn is here in northern Georgia.

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