Where will we be in 18 months?

New and upcoming:
-Sunday, April 20th at Jade Lounge I read for Ink Noise Review, show starts at 7 pm and my cohort (Heidi Beerle, Michael Cooper, and Adam Strong) goes up around 8:30 pm.
-The Writer’s Toolbox course at Multnomah Arts Center starts this Friday, April 18th, at 10 am. Two spots still available.
-This interview with Portland poet Annie Lighthart was published this week. She’s marvelous, truly.
-On May 2nd at 7:30, I’ll be emceeing a story-telling event and benefit at the Multnomah Arts Center with storyteller extraordinaire, Rick Huddle, called Truth be Told.

Okay, the good news:My interview conducted with David Mason,the Colorado poet laureate, over email throughout the course of three months last fall--a 5000 word interview, not an easy word count to meet--is being published by the Writer’s Chronicle, a quite quite reputable journal in the literary world.
 
Okay, the kinda odd news: This interview will probably be published in fall 2015, because the editor said they have a large backlog of interviews.
 
It’s curious to have an article accepted for publication and guess about whether it still will be relevant and vital in 18 months. So much of my own life has changed so thoroughly, violently, beautifully, and always surprisingly in only a year’s time.

Fall 2015, 18 or so months from now....what will be relevant then?

Some things pass and some things last. It's surprising to me how some relationships really last  and some just don't, which ideas fizzle out and which slowly burn up with the majesty of a 6th grade science fair volcano. I often wonder if when I'm 60, I'll have a better sense for what to count on to last, and a better intuition of what not to count on.

A Relationship that didn't last: Me and Dewey the Chinchilla, sometime like 1997. Dewey didn't last six months in our household, as he habitually screamed in the night and would hold onto your fingers with his teeth when he was held against his will. We brought him to the Springfield, Virginia Petco store, which he escaped from.

A desire to make sense of life's hardships and delights whether through puppets or poems, plays or essays has held up so far for me in my life. I hope improve my skills as a writer and human being in the next 18 months, but maybe not so much that I don't recognize David Mason's interviewer when I see her words in print there.

The ideal is that as writers and artists and humans, we change and grow, but still retain something of ourselves, which shows us to be different, but still retaining some recognizable features. The same turn of the lip, gesture of the wrist, or cowlick, perhaps.

May we be granted the minutes, the hours, and days to see ourselves change and grow and somehow appear the same.

Take a picture now, who do you want to see there, in the future?

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​All we have is now: Olly the guinea pig, posing today for a selfie with his mom. He is a good little friend who is about 6 months old. How will he be - might he become a biter or even sweeter - 18 months from now? It's all still in question.

Have a wonderful spring,
Judith