July ATB Reading at Wonderments Wine Shop, Findley Lake, NY.
I'm on Jekyll Island at the moment, and it is a mess. Heavy equipment zips across Beachview Drive to complete The Great Dunes Park in a timely manner. There is planting of palms and pines galore, and our very small shopping district is being torn down to make way for a newer, classier one. The entry onto the island is being re-routed in a semi-circular fashion, and the shops, businesses, and our local P.O. are being stuffed into mobile, metal housing for the duration of our progress. At least they face the ocean.
For as much grumbling as we may do, we all trust that every bit of improvement will be well worth the wait. It will live up to the new slogan for Jekyll's siege of construction: It's All Good.
Right now I'm feeling much the same way about Around the Block. The dust is flying around us, too, at the moment. Except for that brief wondrous week or weekend when we come together and meet up with real live students, Liz, Tracy, and I are always in three different places, doing three different things in three different ways. This fall Tracy has taken on a very special teaching assignment in California, and Liz and I will be doing our stints of Around the Block without her. Which requires a little shifting around, a little moving, a few more orange construction cones.
Here's the plan: Liz will have the month of September to work with you all, and I will have November. In October, Liz will spend the first two weeks with what she calls her Digging Deeper Project -- encouraging you to look at your work in a new way. In the last two weeks, I will encourage you to loosen up, to write in short, fast, bursts before we move onto to longer pieces of work. We think it will be fun.
We look forward to having Tracy back with ATB in the Spring, and --before then-- to spending a fabulous week in Jamaica with you, our real live students. Just take a look at these happy faces from our July Reading in Findley Lake and tell us it's not ALL good. We dare you.
