Modest Goddess

I’m writing in quick bites around here. I always have an idea that I’ll write long, complete, well-thought-out items, but instead I sneak in scribblings in between editing stories or at the beginning or end of a shift. Maybe someday, I’ll have the life of E. Annie Proulx, who was just a little reporter with a little gig in Vermont and then forsook her family and her life to become a novelist. Or Gaugin. He was a postal worker in France. Then he ditched everything to go to Tahiti, and paint luscious-breasted women and tigers. Jesus said to the disciple who wanted to bury his dead father before hitting the road with Jesus to forget it, to let the dead bury the dead and to pick up his cross and follow him. I’m starting to realize the muse is always here with me, and for now I just have to shove aside a little tiny corner of the clutter in my life to make room for her. J.R. R. Tolkien, as a professor at Oxford, jotted in the margin of one of the papers he was grading, “In a hole in the ground lived a hobbit,” and birthed the Lord of the Rings.

I got Modest Goddess. But at least it’s something.