I have written maybe eight or nine hundred pages (8.5 x 11 ) of writing in my life so far. But over the last year, I wrote almost two hundred, and it was a change for me, because it was almost all poetry.
The writing has been for a book, with a book in mind at least, and that has helped solidify and give focus to the body of it. Ninety-eight percent of it has not been shared with anyone. I have been keeping it to myself, allowing it to flow and congeal at its own pace. And I would be sharing it, being more generous with it, but because of the constraints of the publishing world, I have had to keep it private.
I don’t know if you have ever spent a long time alone, but many conclude after such an experience that they miss people. I think it’s easy to take the mere presence of others for granted; being alone tunes us into the fact that the presence of others is a gift. And communing with other people by sharing food, conversation, activities, memories is a furthering of that gift. So it has been hard to keep all this writing to myself, wondering, really, who I am doing it for?