baby steps/finding our way toward new projects

In Adamstown yesterday, I buy this pair of 19th century shoes. I bring them home. I add them to my small collection. I like the scars and worn buttons. I like imagining the child who yearned to run.

Which is precisely what I've been doing lately—imagining, yearning. We need time, I always think, between projects. We can't leave one thing and rush to another. I never have, never do. We have to figure out who we have become in the midst of making and who we are going to be next. We have to believe in the validity of our own work, its place in things. Write as if you are writing your last book, I always tell myself. Because someday it will be your last book.

I will want to believe that it mattered.

And so I buy a pair of shoes and study the scars. I turn stories over in my mind. Yes? No. What? For whom? What is going to matter now?

If no one but me reads the books I write next, will I still believe they were worth making?

They have to be.