Busy Residency Cold and getting colder

I'm not sure if 0 degrees was attained today in Montpelier. I am currently deciding whether to go across the quad for an 8:30 reading as the temperature has tanked and the wind has risen. I think with a bomber hat and silk long johns I should survive. I need to support my local poets.

There was a very powerful lecture just before dinner on #metoo from a faculty member who is an incest and sex addiction survivor. It was pretty amazing and emotional and you could feel the love in the packed room. This was the highlight of a week of highlights.

I was happy that some of my cohorts asked for poetry from me and was happy to oblige. I put together a melange and printed and copied it at the library and distributed it at lunch.

Some pretty interesting writing prompt exercises today. It would be easy to dismiss this sort of thing, but the exercises really seem to tap into the sub-conscious and help you derive some unexpected epiphanies.  This sounds sort of precious, but it works really well and is enjoyable.

In other news, I went to a talk on "getting your work published and finding an agent".  This part of writing is pretty much everything I'm trying to get away from, so this is a basic decision for me: do I want to just lean on the "Art Project" portion of poetry or also get deeper into the "Commerce Project" portion?  The Commerce part sort of is antithetical to the Art, in my feeling of things. People spend a lot of physical, psychic and other energy on the marketing, sales and promotion part of writing and I'm not yet convinced I can tolerate that part of things.  I don't have to of course. Things are going well now.  I think I will sit this sort of stuff out for the near future and concentrate on the ART angle.