It's been an adventurous year for me, both geographically and in other ways as well.
Last summer, I accompanied my husband Richard on a train trip across the country.
He loves trains. The journey I think means more to him than the destination, and this makes sense,
for he is a poet, like me.
For writers, especially artists, the process is the important thing, more important even than the final product, in my view anyway. To see the piece take shape under your hands and to find out by dint of sheer focus what it is you really were after all along, what you were thinking, is the point of writing and the way writers learn about themselves and the world.
We traveled from Virginia to New Orleans on the train. We had never been there before, to the deep south. The sight of moss-covered trees and spoonbills feeding in a swamp was strange and fascinating, and the feeling of traveling across country on the train was as well, uncomfortable though it was, since we didn't have a sleeper, but slept where we sat, except for occasional excursions to the observation car.
The trip home to California on the train was even more amazing, the slowly changing landscape, the changing light. Three days to get home passed very slowly because we had set most of our occupations and our lives aside for the duration of the ride.
And besides the physical travel, I came a distance in other ways this year, finishing up two books of poems, my first collection, A Likely Story, and a new one, composed of collaborations with mostly visual artists and photographers, Together.
A Likely Story will be published by Moon Tide Press this coming summer. Together is still up in the air, though there is a publisher interested in it.
I also edited an anthology of poems inspired by stories on NPR, PBS, and other public media. It's fittingly entitled The Liberal Media Made Me Do It! It will be published by Nine Toes Press, a subdivision of Lummox Press, headed up by the formidable R.D. Armstrong.
I feel that I've changed and grown quite a bit, covered a lot of territory this year, and perhaps that's why I decided that despite my ever-present dearth of funds, I would take a trip to visit family far across the globe.
As a child, I thought I would spend most of my life traveling as my parents did, especially since I have family scattered in many spots across the world. But it didn't happen.
I was busy going to school, working, bringing up a child, taking care of ill parents. Now it is time for me to do what I dreamed of early in life.
This blog will follow my path on this trip, a one-month-long journey to Israel. It's my first real trip to a place where English is not the language. And I don't know any Hebrew. So I am sure that it will be a new experience for me, a person immersed in words most of the time.
I will meet members of my family I know only by name and by their occasional comments on Facebook. And I will see family members who left the U.S. long ago and get to know them again. That is, if we have a common language.
I will try to take pictures (something I'm not so great at) and to give all my friends at home and on Facebook some idea what I'm experiencing.
