It is 5 december 2025, and I’m finally doing a summary of my monthly challenges for september, october, and november. For each of these months, I didn’t really have a monthly challenge. Instead, I worked on the full manuscript for my book, which was originally titled, Haunts, then Girl Ghost Gorge, then Echo // location, then Echolocate | | Echolocated. Fun!
- an idea for a poem: worn out (exhausted), worn down (eroded), worn in (used/familiar) not used (2 oct)
- Chloe Garcia Rober’s temporal saturation, especially her mention of canyons — rust / erosion / blind spot / a break / a clearing (3 oct) return to this in future work
- chanting part of “You Are Here: Tunnel of Trees” while I ran to test it out, Air, using metrics to determine the amount of time I spend in the air while running (7 oct)
- air: how something is made open, meadows/fields/succession, thresholds/Edmund boulevard, the beginnings of “You Are Here: a Stretch of Grass (8 oct)
- grass and solitude and (not) being seen (9 oct)
- the new project? (anti) pastoral / fields / meadows / blind spots / vision field test / ekphrastic + how I see project / park management (10 oct)
- looping and riprap (12 oct)
- my 10 things lists become a 2 page poem filled with list items titled, “I go to the gorge to witness everything” (13 oct)
- vistas and ornamental avenues, pace and pacing (14 oct)
- Richard Siken! (19 oct)
- a ghost story poem about gorge (proposed, but abandoned, an o’clock poem (written, but taken out, to be used later in my pastoral project (20 oct)
- no after chant (taken out) and including George Floyd (to be used later) (21 oct)
- experimented with different ways of adding in a favorite line, each loop tightens the tether, but never enough to stop the looping — mix the words up, like swirling water, or trying a golden shovel (didn’t use) (22 oct)
- continuing work on poem, “She goes to/the gorge/to witness/everything (23 oct)
- reminded of Edgar Allen Poe’s bells — further idea: write an homage poem with cells instead of bells: cells as cone cells, as cancer cells (mom’s cause of death), and room-as-cell, confining, hemmed in (from reading past log entries), and decided to begin and end the collection with bells (28 oct)
- more with cells, cells, cells (a few key lines from this poem, made it into another poem for the collection, m // other (29 oct)