We ate cupcakes at our meeting today, heavy delicious cupcakes, each sporting a butter cream hat that doubled its size. Sweet, overwhelming indulgence. We were celebrating the reading of a member’s novel manuscript.
To write a whole novel is an astonishing act of perseverance and passion. That accomplishment deserves oversized cupcakes laden with butter cream and studded with high quality chocolate bits. My goodness! We indulged in reading gorgeous writing about Wyoming, an anti-dote to Annie Proulx’s eccentric wire-flogged people. We licked our fingers and sang praises, brightened by the sugar high. The book was very good.
The happily sated feeling reminded me of the conference of the Kentucky State Poetry Society we attended on Saturday. The upper room in the Kentucky Fudge Company in Harrodsburg was full of sunbeams, people who’d spent the whole day engaged in reading and writing poetry. Whenever two are gathered in the name of poesy, fellowship happens. Love comes down as a scorcher and blazes across the blank page. Something new is made. In communion. In sharing. In getting outside of the lonely mire of self-ness. Hallelujah for the community of passionate poets, for writers who dare to share their nascent forms of future literature, for that courage, for their discoveries, and for those who listen.
I am an introvert, a writer who gets snarly when interrupted, as my family can attest. They knock on the door and quickly pocket their fists to better to keep their fingers intact. Yet I have come to appreciate what the society of writers does for writing. As one poet said on Saturday, she had felt “different” all her life because of her love of language, until she met the poets in Harrodsburg. Others who knew the magic of creating experience out of words recognized her as kin. To that poet, to the society of poets, to kaboom, to all the books in utero, the poems, essays, plays, and stories yet to be published, I raise a cupcake of appreciation and take the biggest bite imaginable.
