A New Beginning

Well, six months sure flies by. And here we are: 2010. A new year, fresh starts, a blank page. It feels good, doesn't it? Or does it? Truthfully I'm ambivalent about the new year. There are things that happened in 2009 that I'm not ready to let go of yet and some things I wish had never happened.

Here on ATSAD, 2009 was the Year of the Writing Mother, a project I had always envisioned to run its course over the year. Although we are now in a new year and I neglected to post a word in the second half of the year, I'm not quite ready to let it go yet. I've decided to go with the Chinese calendar and let the new year begin in February. I have interviews with four fantastic writing mothers in my possession and will be doling them out between now and the Year of the Tiger.

Except it won't be the Year of the Tiger in my sliver of Blogland. 2010 is the Year of the Wife.

Over the last few years I have been working on a new collection of poetry told from the points of view of the polygamous wives of Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon Church. I'm very close to finishing my manuscript and have started to find the wives homes in literary journals and a beautiful chapbook. I'd like to share a bit of my work with you this year as well as the work of some other very talented friends who have also explored wives in their own writings or readings. This idea is still very much in its infancy, but I'm pretty excited to see where it will go.

I hope you'll drop in occasionally to check up on me and the wives. I can't offer my standard tea with warm blueberry scones, but I hope to have some engaging discussions and writing to make the visit worth it.