peterography

Ever since I dispatched the woodchucks some of the zucchini plants have started to recover and two of them have produced new fruit. The others became horribly infected from their mauling and are dying in a mass of brown, curling decay.

Meanwhile we’re having our best raspberry and blueberry year ever, and yesterday I harvested enough blueberries to bake up a batch of muffins, using a Jane Brody recipe, for my wife and two musicians from Canada who were staying with us. Today I drove to Provincetown for a poetry workshop while my wife and our two guests went to Wellesley College for a music workshop.

I’m staying at the Carpe Diem Guest House, which is actually a charming cluster of Provincetown houses joined in the back by delighful gardens, and only a block from the Fine Arts Work Center where my classes are held. All the rooms are named after writers – I’m in the Jean Cocteau room and, ironically, there’s nothing in it resembling a desk to sit at and write, so I’ve piled chair cushions on the floor and I’m sitting on them with my computer on a coffee table writing this. Unfortunately the arrangement is less than ergonomic so this entry will be short.

Tonight we had a brief wine-and-cheese orientation for the Fine Arts Work Center where students in all the writing and visual arts classes for this week met and mingled. This was followed by a half-hour mini-class for my poetry workshop, where we met the instructor, Major Jackson, and learned a little bit about our fellow students. I had first heard about Major Jackson in a Radio Open Source interview over the winter and signed up for the workshop on that basis.