moonlit writing

I'm going to the big to-do over at the Loft tonight. I hear the Erdrich sisters are wearing evening gowns. I have nothing appropriately glamorous in my closet but I am full of the moonlit spirit and a writer's heart. I should be out shopping for a pashima wrap or a sparkly clutch but instead I'm conjuring up writerly words to prepare myself .

Writer Dorothy Gallagher, who has had a life full of calamities--an ex-husband who carried brass knuckles, the psychiatrist who seduced her, her current husband's total paralysis--says this:

“Truly, life is just one damn thing after another. The writer’s business is to find the shape in unruly life and to serve her story. Not, you may note, to serve her family, or to serve the truth, but to serve the story.”

And this full-moon poem by Dylan Thomas, which is even better read aloud:

In My Craft or Sullen Art

In my craft or sullen art
Exercised in the still night
When only the moon rages
And the lovers lie abed
With all their griefs in their arms, I labour by singing light
Not for ambition or bread
Or the strut and trade of charms
On the ivory stages
But for the common wages
Of their most secret heart.

Not for the proud man apart
From the raging moon I write
On these spindrift pages
Nor for the towering dead
With their nightingales and psalms
But for the lovers, their arms
Round the griefs of the ages,
Who pay no praise or wages
Nor heed my craft or art.