The Long Route Home from Residency and Getting Organized

My return from a busy residency at Ashland University's MFA Program featuring daily workshops on my manuscript with Stephen Harvey and Robert L. Root, introduction to a variety of modern Creative Nonfiction Forms, readings and lectures from a cast of guest speakers and my participation in a poetry reading has left me with a pile of books, checklists to reach completion, and the need for a tightly planned schedule.

We routed our journey to the Residency visiting family members in Tennessee and Virginia, golf, and on the way home, a stop in Washington, DC.

                                                                     Bob and I at the Lincoln Memorial

Following that trip, we stopped to weed the gardens and then headed off for family visits in Washington state. This was essentially nuts but for a family used to twice monthly visits the one every two years or three years 2 day visit seems pretty harsh.

In Seattle, I took time to collect family documents, collect some books, scan old photographs and hear various opinions about what the family thought. 

I visited some old stomping grounds, like Larrabee St. Park in Bellingham where I went to school at Western Washington University to get my Bachelor of Science in Computer Science.

My return has me facing:

-- the writing of a 25 page critical paper featuring two additional texts, and a check off that I've completed the reading on 50 memoirs (got the first draft of 17 pages off and back with a big no, please do it this way, that has me editing it, no problem)

-- the writing of the framework for the memoir (this is being argued about whether to include history, culture, the future, the early years, the current years, how to use a CNF format potentially, and I'm thinking of a title change. It has me aware that I am telling the story instead of showing it. 

-- writing scene for missing sections of my overall manuscript

-- looking at my in progress poetry edits

-- building a viable schedule for completion

-- continued work on weekly discussions

-- return to what little social life I get via the Catholic church, golf and online activities

-- facing a variety of bureaucratic details I don't want to deal with

Some new plans for the next months includes looking at a variety of literary journals, getting back to my blogging, and polishing lots of work. Hopefully I can dig myself out from under the paper work. I've made a start with a concrete timeline, sorting of my files and photographs, and generating another 10000 words.