Quilting

The idea is stuck in my head, like a burr in a sock -- the idea making a book out of some of my blog posts. It would be like a quilting project. I have all the made squares; I just need a frame, and to arrange them so that the colors please each other at the edges and the whole thing makes a satisfying pattern.

It does not strike me as a good idea, but that doesn't make it go away. Its first incarnation was the thought that I could make a poetry chapbook. I like some of my poems, now. But I gathered them all together, and there weren't enough good ones to fill a chapbook. Half a dozen, maybe, struck me as good enough to bother with.

Even as I was gathering them, I was thinking, this isn't the right thing to do. Poetry isn't my strong suit. My strong suits are short rhapsodic prose meditations (I loathe the term "prose poem," but I suppose that's probably their proper name) and informal essays on practicing the Dharma. Could those be made into a book? Dubious. One that would sell? That's not dubious at all. Of course such a book wouldn't sell.

But it might be fun to make. It's been interesting just to pull out pieces and think about them as parts of something bigger, to think about juxtapositions, to think about what a frame might look like. I might be far enough distant from the toxic (to me) ambition to "be a writer" to actually have some fun with that sort of thing.