THREE MONTHS LATER...

It's three months since I flew back to Toronto from Tasmania/Australia--three months! How did that happen? It's as if my life divides into before Tasmania and after Tasmania--the before, of course, feels very far away, but in an odd way so does the after. I haven't really found my feet back here yet--and actually I'm not "back here" but in Winnipeg for 10 days to discuss a mutual interview that poet Jan Horner and I are working on for the journal CV2. And where is Tasmania in all this? It floats, a weave of sensations, memories, ideas, conversations, landscapes, food (that flathead, yum!), books, light, faces, waiting for me to hunker down and attend to them.

Back in Toronto I have a lovely, new-to-me, pine desk in my writing room, many thanks to Kelley Aitken, and a sorting table littered with baskets of paper--correspondence, manuscript, print-outs, none to do with Tasmania. But my two post bags and one box of books and papers (shipped sea mail from Hobart) have all arrived, the final one a couple of weeks ago. When I go home I'll work at clearing space for them on that table. Then I'll haul out my file box of 800 or so photographs, and see what emerges. I want to use this blog as a re-entry point to those lovely weeks and months. Perhaps that will ameliorate the odd sensation of being slightly off-balance I feel when memories or images from Tasmania sweep over me.