Writing, rock-sculpting, cloud surfing....

I'm leading a double life: grant writer by day, career biographer by night.

Grant writing is a tenuous, and temporary, occupation for me, and one that might stretch into a permanent university position, if I get lucky. It's a kind of writing that feels like trying to coax sense out of stone. Sometimes the columns of statistics seem impervious, and as if nothing sensible can be made out of them. But slowly something begins to emerge until finally you have something that might -- just might -- land some money for your program. There is only functional prose here, the stuff of moneychangers and bureaucrats, but if you get the money for your program, you might send some disadvantaged kids to college who wouldn't otherwise be able to go.

By evening I'm at home still trying to put the finishing touches on a book begun long ago in an access of optimism. The subject is somewhat elusive, the prose and poetry I am trying to capture is a will-o-the-wisp on the arid wind. The famous writer I am trying to write about is a kind of desert dervish, a ghost in the Utah canyons, and sometimes I feel as if I'm trying to capture a spirit made of air. All of it is for her glory, and a little reflected glory for myself. Writing becomes the sticky wicket that I sometimes can't shake words out of: I have never experienced full-blown writer's block, but there are times when the sentences come out only half-formed or still-born, or nothing emerges at all. I wonder if I can keep going to the well if I keep squeezing words out of the rock by day, and trying to coax them out of the air by evening.

Sometimes I just want to come home and close my eyes be wordless for a while.