Writer's Residency at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts/Day 1

My writing life has been in need of some serious repair.
So here I am--just 24 hours since I arrived at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Already I feel the blossoming.

I brought 21 little notebooks with me to the VCCA.

Disorganized paper versions of my disorganized brain. Each one filled with ideas for essays, short stories, stuff for the memoir and stuff for the novel. All completely un-findable when I want to find it.
I'm half-way to fixing that.

Which is not to say that I'm shredding all of it. Much of it I've already used. Some of what's left no longer interests me. Some of it was useful in the short story I started today.

Other things are a revelation. Like this personal note from 2005 or maybe 2006. I found it in one of the little notebooks that I began keeping when my first real writing teacher, Barbara Abercrombie, said that a writer needs to carry a notebook and write things down.

Mr. Ex frequently came home from his office at 9 or 10 p.m. in those days and some nights never even said hellohowwasyourday, and sometimes I worried that he would leave me. I never confessed my fears to anyone.


A year or two later when he did leave me, I told everyone I'd been completely blindsided.
And I had been.
But I also felt insecure enough to wonder what I would do if he left me. Worried enough that I took out my writer's notebook and wrote it down.