This weekend's project

Well, there is never only one project, is there? Never in this house, anyway.

But the one on my mind is the project of putting together a new chapbook manuscript to send off to a competition on Monday. I had planned to send the one I already have together, but a little searching through the records revealed that I had already submitted that one two years ago. The judge is different, of course, but maybe the preliminary readers are the same. Better to go with a new one than the same one - that one can go to other competitions this fall.

Earlier this week I went through the poems to see what possible themes I could pull out and have a) enough poems for a chapbook while maintaining b) a cohesive focus. I'm looking at the intersection of two themes - being in the world and explaining/portioning out the world to a child. Because sometimes you can't explain the world, and sometimes you don't want to. Sometimes both.

But then the problem is that eventually you have to - and how do you know, how do you judge correctly, the right time? It is hard enough to explain conventional warfare - how do you even approach the idea of child soldiers? We inch our way into topics, waiting to see how each morsel of information is taken. Last December after the shootings in Newtown I provided minimal information - until it became clear other kids had gone to school with much more information. And then the only thing to do is to talk it through, piece by piece carefully and honestly.

Now that we have such a reader on our hands, a little 7-year-old word-vacuum, curious about everything and always eager to read over my shoulder, this becomes more commonplace. Things on the radio, conversations overheard, newspaper headlines, titles of books around the house, it all works itself into her questions eventually. Meanwhile, there is this space, this small space of time where her understanding of the world is still largely shaped by the information she gets from us. I've never been comfortable with painting too rosy a picture, but I also don't want to plunge her into knowledge she isn't ready for. The calibration of knowledge has been a preoccupation of both my parenting and writing lately, and that is also the space I mean to fill this chapbook.