Got what I came for.

Had my first workshop with Phillip Lopate yesterday, and after he made another lady cry with his blunt dislike for her work ("This didn't work for me at all. Show me something else if you want."), he delighted in my manuscript, stroked my fragile little ego, and gave me some real guidance on where to go from here. Although he did say something like "When writing's this good, just keep going, go for it. I don't have much to say about marvelous work."

This is wonderful for a couple of reasons:

1. Duh.
2. Having worked with a mentor who confessed to falling in love with me and then mercilessly manipulating me (okay, I know I had to be complicit to some extent), I began to question if what he had to say about my writing was actually about my writing, or if it was about his doing anything to make me submit to his desires. Buttering me up, so to speak. Well, now it doesn't matter, because someone I respect much more than him has validated my project in a huge way.
3. Yikes! Maybe I am a real writer.

Whatever that means. I guess I realize I suffer from having been a young, lousy "poet" and playwright who then became a philosophy major who mastered mediocre academic writing, only to go to journalism school where they beat that shit out of me (thank God) so I could become a working journalist. It's only now that I've taken the real risk of attempting literature, telling the story I've needed to tell since I can remember in an artful way. You never know with your own work whether it's any good until a trusted reader gets his hands on it. And trust is something I've questioned and wrestled with a lot lately.

So, this isn't an end point, not at all. I'm not in this to be told I'm good. I'm in this to get something done. And I'm ready to keep going.

In other news, I'm getting more and more adjusted to the place, to the culture. Kiki, delicate flower that he is, is also making a valiant effort to quit being a poopy puppy and overcome his homesickness and desperate loneliness and isolation in being away from his boyfriend. Yesterday we ate: pastries for breakfast, crepes for lunch, and a much needed dinner of grilled meat at a Columbian joint a block from home--all at outdoor cafes; found H&M, Marks and Spencer, and a Sephora (hot damn!); got ice cream twice; and watched what we think was a Czech movie on cable. We also walked eleventyfive miles and had our first really good night's sleep. Today I cooked scrambled eggs with veggies for breakfast and I'm working on ratatouille with couscous for dinner. It's fun playing house with someone again. We also attempted to use the Czech washing machine in the flat, but I think we ended up deep frying our clothes.

Good thing we already found the H&M.

Tomorrow I give a reading, and I better figure out what in the hell to read. I might just write something new. They say not to do that, but I do lots of things people warn against, much to my own delight.

What's going on with y'all?