May 4

We are watching Into the Wild tonight.  I've read the book, in Joyce Dyer's Creative nonfiction class at Hiram.

Funny that, I was just at Hiram tonight.  Standing in a too-hot room in the new Writing House on Hiram Hill, feeling rather unsettled and out of place, not at home in that place that was once my home.  

I went to attend a reception for Joyce Dyer's retirement, a retirement that means another piece of my Hiram is shifting and leaving.  It was not an easy moment, standing in that room.

But then-- the words about her.  Glimpses into the life and the career of a brilliant writer and a gifted teacher and a woman who is loved, loved, loved.  Luscious poetry was quoted and impossibly young college seniors testified to the impact Joyce has had on their lives. And-- one more lesson on writing, on craft, on life, from Joyce herself. 

To bask in the luminosity of her words!  I wish I could be a student again, sitting around a seminar table in that tiny upstairs room, being brilliant and young and full of potential. 

But Joyce, too, had her years of motherhood, of putting her writing ambitions off to one side while she did the business of living a beautiful life, raising a son, tending a marriage.  

And because the world is wide and life is rich, she continued to grow into the professor who helped shape my life.  And because the world is wide and life is rich, she is heading off to immerse herself in words and workshops and all the opportunities that come her way.  

The world is wide and life is rich and I am on fire to write about it. 

May.

I will write every day.