Tales of the blue and yellow sun

From the diary: “January 27, 1982

“I bought an anything book. Beautifully bound. I’m writing Tales of the blue and yellow sun within it.”

I’ve been digging up old poetry notebooks and going through them for poems to challenge myself with. I post poems on my LoveSettlement blog that I see something in (I don’t post the ones I hate), but I push myself to choose a poem I really don’t see a way to fix. Then I try things to make it acceptable. The Tales of the blue and yellow sun notebook is one I’ve been mining lately. The Tales were supposed to be linked poems & stories about a fantasy land. I would write them, and if I thought they were good I would carefully recopy them into the notebook. I filled 33 pages before I crapped out on tales. When I returned to the notebook two years later I gave the book a second title, Work Journal, Part Two.

Rather than honor the notebook by only allowing into it the bestest writing I could writ I was going to honor my writing by having it happen in a nice book. Easily lost loose notebook paper or scratch paper wasn't quite the honoring it needed. And revising and crossing things out was going to happen there in the book, too. Flipping through the notebook now I don’t see much revision. Well. I guess that's my current assignment, eh?

In other possibly interesting old news: this was the month Sebastopol got cut off by a big storm. “[On] Main Street water sometimes four feet deep was flowing. Water was flowing into Zerbino’s [a restaurant] and the Dutch Boy paint store.” My brother had to move back upstairs as two or three inches of water filled the basement and the sump pump died. School was canceled for a day. “We are now living in a national disaster area,” I said.