I was just in Mineral, Wa, at The Mineral School, a place where Jane Hodges has launched an artist residency program in a 1947 school house.  It’s an ambitious undertaking in a really wonderful building in a secluded place–Mineral has a campground, a small general store, a tavern, and a church (as well as a few tractors and some big trout that I’ve seen rising in the lake).  Perfect seclusion to get some work done, to focus on the poem, the novel, the memoir or book of essays.  It’s been my home base for visits to Centralia College, Onalaska High School, and Eatonville High School, and today, I’ll go to the Salkum Branch of the Timberland Library system.  Keeping busy and meeting wonderful people, dedicated teachers, and community members who value connection with one another and the world around them.

I went on a walk down the road from The Mineral School to see Mt. Rainier–too cloudy and rainy–but found instead the Mineral Lake Lodge and this cool quilt made by Caroline, the owner: Yeats is everywhere!  If only the world wasn’t so full of weeping.  A great visit to a wet and wild and secluded part of our state–and no Bigfoot sightings, although I did see this: 

Little feet (see them up in the corner?):  one of the great artists of the last century who wrote:  “There has been a shift of emphasis in the practice of the arts of painting, music and dancing during the last few years. There are no labels yet but there are ideas. These ideas seem primarily concerned with something being exactly what it is in its time and place, and not in its having actual or symbolic reference to other things. A thing is just that thing. It is good that each thing be accorded this recognition and this love. Of course, the world being what it is-or the way we are coming to understand it now-we know that each thing is also every other thing, either actually or potentially. So we don’t, it seems to me, have to worry ourselves about providing relationships and continuities and orders and structures-they cannot be avoided.”

And then, on my last day there:  the mountain.

Next entry (per a request) will offer some ideas to help with writing–