today is my fifty-fifth birthday,

Where does the time go? Oh, I don't even ask those questions anymore. Do you remember where I was last year? I've been wearing my 'birthday boy' pin since Monday, given I prefer to take the whole week as 'birthday,' as you already know. My birthday always falls into March Break, so there were only rarely opportunities to acknowledge such with school pals from the farm, especially with mother's ill-health and the usual array of distance and farm work.

When I sent this pic to my brother Darren the other morning, he responded with a face-slap emoji. It matters not! We take the whole week.

What is happening currently? Fifty-five, hm. I care not for the number, but I don't feel much different than five years ago, or twenty-five. Age might be a number, and we all imagine ourselves held at a particular age, with mine being well younger than this. It is a strange thing, certainly.

Our young ladies (Rose has been requesting lately I keep her image off the internet) have been in enough activities over the past few months--Aoife's ukulele lessons, German classes, Embers, ringette practices and games, and Rose's practices and performances through the Anglican Girls' Choir--that they both rebelled against any March Break camps or activities, preferring to simply have a few days they didn't have to do anything or go anywhere. Even still, Rose had a choir practice, and each of them had an afternoon with one of their friends. We also managed a couple of days earlier in the week at the cottage, slipping the bounds of the National Capital Region for Sainte-Adele (we did manage New Year's there, which I seem not to have posted about, as well as Thanksgiving). We went to the cottage, and I sat nearly three days with notebook, and a mound of books I never quite got through as much as I would have hoped. The snow was perfect for building, but Rose wasn't feeling up to it, so we let them lay fallow for a bit. Once they're back at school it will be back at the routine and the running around (multiple days have them either back-to-back or overlapping or simultaneous activities, so I get it).

I've been feeling underwater since November, but I can almost see the light at the end of the tunnel, he says, optimisticallly (unless that's simply me having a stroke, which isn't impossible). Next week is VERSeFest, in case you're around (I've been Artistic Director and Board President for over a year now, which I'm still confused by). I'm producing a new chapbook by American poet Eileen Myles for the event, and our schedule is packed with incredible performers. Have you gone through our list yet? The workshops by Myles and Phil Hall might have a space or two left as of today, but who knows. Things fill up fast.

These days, I'm hoping to be circling the ends of the manuscript for "the green notebook" (some two hundred single-spaced manuscript pages, if you can believe it), as well as "the genealogy book" (excerpts of both projects I've been posting for months now over at my substack), two different creative non-fiction/book-length essay projects I've been deep within, for well over a year now (most likely longer than that). I'm not entirely sure where I might send either of these manuscripts, but I am hoping to have something worth sending out around May or June, possibly. I already completed a further manuscript of short stories last year (see one of those stories here, which landed online this week at Leon Literary Review), a process of some seven or so years. The novel-in-progress that plays with certain of the same characters that move through both collections of short stories (begun during that first Covid summer) I've yet to complete, so once those two larger non-fiction projects are completed, I'm hoping I can more seriously work to complete the thing (should I send it to that publisher who turned down my short stories with "we can't sell short stories. let us know if you have a novel"?). It would be good to get that project finished and out, since I've so many further thoughts of what might be fun to work with, work on, etcetera, beyond that. I mean, my novel-in-progress "Don Quixote" was started in 2007, after all. I'm still adding short essays to a slowly-growing manuscript, "reading in the margins : essays on prose writers," the bulk of which I've also been posting to my enormously clever substack. I'm in the midst of at least a further four pieces at the moment.

And poems? Oh, I've been poking at poems for a while now, although far slower than I would prefer. I'm still mid-way through a manuscript of response-poems, some of which has already appeared online; as I've been describing the project:

Fair bodies of unseen prose is an homage text for, around and after American poets Laynie Browne and Rosmarie Waldrop, furthering my exploration around and through the lyric sentence and prose poem. All poem titles (which appear in italics above each brief prose poem) are taken in order from the last line or phrase of each poem in Browne’s In Garments Worn By Lindens (Tender Buttons Press, 2019), itself an homage text to Rosmarie Waldrop, with all of Browne’s titles taken from Waldrop’s Lawn of Excluded Middle (Tender Buttons Press, 1994). As my own sequence progresses, echoes of texts by both poets resound throughout, especially from Browne’s In Garments Worn By Lindens and Practice Has No Sequel (Pamenar Press, 2023), Rosmarie Waldrop’s Blindsight (New Directions, 2003) and Gap Gardening: selected poems (New Directions, 2016), and the collection Crosscut Universe: Writing on Writing from France, edited/translated by Norma Cole (Burning Deck, 2000).

In early 2023, I reviewed three recent titles by Laynie Browne, and quickly realized just how much affinity there was between her work and my own, an element of which is certainly due to our shared love of, and deep influence from, the work of Rosmarie Waldrop. Browne and I soon exchanged books, and In Garments Worn By Lindens prompted this response.

I've also been prodding at some longer, extended poems, really gearing up, it would seem, to a manuscript I'm itching to get to (I've been assembling titles and scraps for a few years now, honestly), once the non-fiction projects are completed. As well, there's a further poetry project I've been working on for about nine weeks or so, but it is too early to speak of such a thing as yet. One poem a week, responding to prompts. I'm hoping I can get to a year or more, if possible, get a book out of this thing. We shall see. Beyond that, my poetry collection the book of sentences (University of Calgary Press) is out in mid-October (it has a cover!), a direct follow-up (with cover design echoes) to the book of smaller (University of Calgary Press, 2022). Should I let them know I completed a third in the trilogy well over a year ago? Once we're further through the process of this current collection, I'll most likely send that one along. A trilogy of poetry titles, if you can believe it. Separately, Snow day (Spuyten Duyvil, 2025) exists as a kind of side-project simultaneous to the gap between the book of smaller and the book of sentences, with a further manuscript of sequences simultaneous to the gap between the book of sentences and "Autobiography" (the manuscript for that second gap title is currently sitting with a Canadian press for consideration). I also have a forty-ish page essay out soon with Spuyten Duyvil as well, once I've the attention span to sit down with the final manuscript and get that to the publisher, A river runs through it: a writing diary , collaborating with Julie Carr, an essay composed around the call-and-response work we did across early Covid-lockdown, produced as the chapbook river / estuaries (above/ground press, 2023), and since carved up and reworked in our own individual directions. Probably April or May? The only hold-up right now is my own attention span. And then, of course, the manuscript of short short stories I've been poking away at for more than a decade, as a follow-up to The Uncertainty Principle: stories, (Chaudiere Books, 2014). Where would I even send that? I've been posting short excerpts from that manuscript over at my substack for a while as well, if such strikes your interest. Oh, and I'm doing a reading tomorrow in Ottawa with a bunch of folk, if such strikes your fancy. I'm considering it the launch of Snow day, so you should come out to that.

Much as last year this time, I still work to dismantle my home office, for the sake of our young ladies having their own rooms. Rose served me an eviction notice some time ago. This is all taking too long.