As the mom of a young child who also teaches full time, finding the time to write comes at a reasonably big expense…late nights writing after everyone has gone to bed leads to more than I usually care for bleary-eyed mornings and less than energetic days of parenting, teaching, wifeing, friending…I can’t help but wonder sometimes whether my quality of life would benefit from me lightening up just a bit, and not always being so focused on producing poems. Weirdly, it doesn’t seem like a choice these days. The week after my second chapbook manuscript was accepted for publication (Messages from Salt Water is due to release by summer of 2019), I began working on my third book (like the last, quite confessional – art, music and ‘performance’ are emerging as themes). As of tonight, it looks like it won’t be too much longer until this third book is done, although it’s pretty likely that I will fall down the rabbit-hole of feverish, compulsive editing for God-knows-how-long, as I am prone to, even at that the ‘done’ stage. That said, it’s an exciting and productive time, since as I work on completing my third book, two ‘travel’ chapbooks (one about Paris and the South of France; the other pitting the states of Nevada and Arizona against one another) are also starting to emerge and take shape. These two side projects and my strange little poems about the Ainu people of Japan, keep my mind and soul completely absorbed in my ‘poetry world’ when I do manage to make the time to write. This inimitable form of escapism is what makes the loss of free time, and the acquisition of fatigue and day time distractedness ultimately worthwhile, I suppose. For, much as I am prone to complaining about writing, times like this remind me of how much I enjoy crafting poems in the way that I like to read them, working and reworking language so that it might capture the essence of some important or special place, person, thought, or experience… Strange hobby, writing – it simultaneously feeds and depletes the soul, offers little to no monetary or public reward, yet there’s so much that I enjoy about it. Myself personally, I’ve been hooked since I was ten…