What Am I Doing Here?
Okay, okay, I know it’s been a long time. What have I been busy with?
Trying to undo some of the house problems that I had paid little or no attention to for the previous 40 years of my life. (For the previous 69 years of my life, now that I think about it.)
Trying to hold my finger in the dike as if to stop a small leak in our finances, when — in all truth — there’s a Snoqualmie Falls at flood-time cascading over the top.
Trying to read only so much political news so as not to plunge myself even further into the morass. (I appear to be mixing metaphors, but stay with me.)
Having some good visits with Bruce at his new home — even planning a Valentine’s Day lunch with him and two of our daughters later this afternoon.
Trying to keep on keeping on writing, even a little bit, every day, because I know writing will save me.
Somedays it feels as though someone has grabbed up my life, turned it upside down, and shaken it. Somedays I feel empty, and bereft. Somedays I feel empty and ready to be filled with something new. Something newly mysterious but maybe in a wonderful way. “Be curious,” my therapist says, and I write those two words on a notecard and pin them on the wall above my desk. BE CURIOUS.
Change is hard, but I suspect it’s the cost of living in a human body.
created by Kelli Russell Agodon and shared today in her Valentine’s Day Substack
Previous-Bethany (who hangs around) likes to curl into a fetal position (a lot) and say things like, “I have no talent for this!” “I can’t do this!” But I am changing. I’ve attended a No Kings protest, I’ve written to senators and 
congress people, I’m getting a new roof (right now in fact, much hammering overhead), and new flooring (much needed but on hold), and dealing with a wet, rotted sub-floor in the kitchen (not sure how that’s going to turn out). I asked my therapist, “Am I going to get through this?” And she said, “You are getting through it.”
And, miracle of miracles, I have a new review up at EIL — of Matthew Murrey’s Little Joy.
And, other kinds of writing keep seeping out, in part thanks to 
Sheila Bender’s on-line class about writing grief. In addition to Sheila’s books and my classmates’ posts, I’ve also been reading an anthology, The Language of Loss: Poetry and Prose for Grieving and Celebrating the Love of Your Life, edited by Barbara Abercrombie; and Finding Meaning: the Sixth Stage of Grief, by David Kessler, which The Los Angeles Times calls the very best kind of self-help book.
My typical strategy now would be share a poem or short prose section from one of these books (so many excellent choices). Instead I’m going to share my own new poem. Excuse any hammering or thumping that creeps into the audio. And thank you for listening.
Grief wakes me in the morning
and puts me to bed at night.
She stirs sorrow into my oatmeal.
She fusses, adjusting the light
as I read, offering a blanket.
When I leave the house,
she grabs her shoes and goes with me,
walks fast, takes my hand.
Last winter, too, she was here
though wearing a mask of anger.
Didn’t I wake you then, she asks,
didn’t I lie down beside you?
Sometimes she is a mother,
sometimes a lover,
sometimes my child. I pull her
onto my lap. I begin to call her
by my own name.—Bethany Reid (2.11.26)
weirdness) of it was that focusing on the fascicles made it impossible for me to turn the class into “all of Bethany’s favorite E. D. poems.” In each class I asked, “What caught your eye? What do you want to bring to our attention?” As a result, we put a microscope to poems I’ve barely given a glance in the past. And everything we picked up gave us so much to talk about. It was ideal.
poetry presses: MoonPath Press, Concrete Wolf Poetry Series, and World Enough Writers. She also leads generative workshops, helps people assemble their books of poems, teaches at conferences, and writes her own poetry. To borrow the phrasing from the end of her poem, “A Blue True Dream,” her writing mantra must be “yes and yes and / illimitably yes.” 