On Monday, I gave a reading at Nebraska Wesleyan University. This was my first time to Nebraska. The reading was held in a gallery on campus that had some very cool looking art on the walls. I was particularly partial to this NOT sculpture-type thing (below). I read a story from The Isle of Youth about acrobats. Afterwards there was a nice conversation with the audience about voice, the cure for writer’s block (in the immortal words of Richard Bausch, “lower your standards and keep going”), and why crisis is good for fiction.
This morning I got up at four to fly back to Boston, because I needed to be back in time to teach my Tuesday afternoon class. My flight out of Lincoln was delayed and so I arrived in Chicago with mere minutes to make my connection. This led to a breakneck run from one terminal to another, down the hallway with the nice tall windows, up and down several escalators, through the tunnel-like hallway with the neon light installation in the ceiling, another escalator, a seemingly endless white hall. As I ran, I kept thinking this would be a great commercial for Jillian Michaels’ workout DVDs, for if it were not for Jillian, there was NO WAY I could have run for so long with luggage in tow. I made it right before the doors closed and a few hours later, we were descending into Boston. From the window, I could see the clouds moving over the water and the scattering of tiny islands and the cargo ships and it was all very beautiful.
