I made very few friends at the writing workshop I went to last summer,

and have kept in touch with fewer, although I did try to keep in touch with one person, who never wrote back. I thought of that week in Portland just now when I finished watching a movie on TV, a film adapted from a popular nonfiction book about a woman who goes on a trip of self discovery, and saw the name of someone from my poetry group appear in the closing credits. I felt proud; not like at our thesis reading when Jenn read from her little orange book or when Panta read from her pomegranate book, but proud still. And it dawned on me that it must be coming very close to this year's Tin House workshop and I began fantasizing about what it would be like to go again, but this year stay at Reed instead of sharing Tali's attic with Age and riding the bus for an hour every morning, and try to make more friends. You know what's sad? Even if for some miraculous reason my very new job would let me go, I haven't written anything new since then that I could submit with my application. Maybe I'll have my own writing workshop that week, an evening workshop, where I'll force myself to work on the beetle book. Does anyone have a studio in a serene landscape that I can use?