I’m back!  It was hard to leave the Vineyard, as it always is, but wonderful to get back to London, despite the white skies and constant construction noise.  Did you miss me?  I can honestly say I actually did miss writing to all of you.  Although I wasn’t taking the time to actually put fingers to keyboard, I often found myself falling asleep while writing new postings in my head.  I guess I’ve gotten used to speaking my thoughts out loud in this space-age way, and having friends from all over the world respond.  Looks like I’m hooked……

There’s one thing I do hate about the first day or two back at home.  Unbelievably, it’s not the laundry.  It’s not even the jet lag, although that is a pain.  (In this day and age, why can’t someone invent something to make us automatically time adjust, some machine, maybe like Woody Allen’s “orgasmatron,” that we can just walk into, shake around a bit, and come out again back in synch with our surroundings?) But what I really hate are the piles of mail. Inevitably it takes hours of sitting and sorting and reading, all just to make new piles either of pieces of paper to be thrown out or, even worse, pieces of paper to be attended to by creating more pieces of paper.  But this past weekend, in the middle of all that rubble, was something special just for me: a complimentary copy of the poetry magazine, The Seventh Quarry with

 my own poem, “Solitaire,” sitting proudly in the middle of it.  It’s always a thrill having my work show up in a new magazine, but this is especially enheartening for two reasons.  Firstly, this magazine is jointly edited by a Welsh poet, Peter Thabit Jones, and an American poet, Vince Clemente.  So having it arrive just when I was feeling the most torn between my two homes was another one of those moments of synchronicity that I love.  But it gets better than that, because Vince was not only a former teacher of mine, but one of my most important teachers.  Vince was my English teacher all through the turbulent years of High School.  Vince was the first teacher who ever told me I could write.  We had lost touch for 35 years, but a short while ago connected again via a mutual poet friend,  Daniel Thomas Moran, whom I met at a bluechrome poetry reading.  Dan was a terrific discovery for me, not only because of his poetry and his friendship with Vince, but because he grew up in the next town to mine at the same time in the same age.  He brings me back to a world that I almost never go to. Have a listen:
Although I might have been feeling torn in half, I’m now feeling put back together again.  And it’s a very good thing, because the next few months brings another whirlwind of activity for me and this fledgling career of mine — starting on Monday with a week-long workshop on a new play I’ve been writing with me, three actors, a dramaturg, and the wildly inventive director John Wright.  Stay tuned.