October 15, 2023...
Looking through a notebook from 2016, I find some early drafts of poems and some notes for what will become Terrible Terrain. Here's what I was thinking at the time:
—Don't be linear.
—Let her [Lavinia] tell the same story twice, in different ways.
—Let her second-guess herself, as with the dolls/Jane Eyre story.
—Blur the line between wake and dream.
—There is no line between wake and dream.
—E as a constant presence, even after death—how could she possibly not be a constant presence?
I am glad that most of that managed to find its way into the completed manuscript, even though I have the bad habit of writing brilliant things in notebooks and then immediately forgetting them. I guess that's what notebooks are for...
