Emily Brisse

At almost four in the afternoon, the wind picks up and sifts through the golden woods. The tree trunks bronze and redden, branches on fire in the heavy sky that flickers with the disappearing sun. I wonder what I owe the fading day, why I keep my place at this dark desk by the window measuring the force of the wind, gauging how long a certain cloud will hold that pink edge that even now has slipped into gray? Quickly the lights are appearing, a lamp in every window and nests of stars on the rooftops. Ladders lean against the hills and people climb, rung by rung, into the night. -- by Joyce Sutphen

Good morning, It it raining here, lightly, and the view out my window is an ecstatic shaking green. I am three floors up, and yet I do not see the sky, I do not see the ground: just trunks and branches and leaves, close and middling and deep. What a scene to wake to! As ridiculous as these last months have been, these trees are saving me. Have saved me. Are already old friends.  I see now I'm going to have to write about them. Later. Soon. Graduation for the seniors tonight. And then: summer. Spring was a new house. A new roof. New floors and carpets and paint and cabinet liner and drawer pulls and towels. It was so much more space, these large open rooms that echoed even with our whispers. It was windows, light streaming in through the then bare branches. It was one holy morning when the buds popped open, and everywhere was suddenly yellow green and green yellow and holy holy holy. It was worrying about an old house with holes and trusting a new world so very able to fill it...

A snow "event" is tapering off outside my window, dropping perhaps ten inches of new white, and where half the state's population is elated and the other half depressed (a friend reminded me it was 80' right around this time last year here), my mind has never been more inside, less focused on coats and boots, more in tune with another body's breath. I have decided that late winter is the perfect time to welcome an infant into the world. All there is to do is cuddle. Elliot is wonderful, friends, and I hope each of you know how much I've appreciated your support and positive thoughts throughout his journey here. Right now he is beside me, asleep. This means I should start dinner. This means I should fold some clothes. This means I should call the insurance company. This means I should actually unload the dishwasher, which was a task I began this morning and got as far as, oh, opening its door. I'm learning that there are a lot of things that should but do...

Sometimes, even though I know such phrases are cliche, I can't help myself from repeating over and over comments like, "Time flies by" and "Where has the summer gone" and "Each year, each year goes more quickly, I swear."  Perhaps these phrases are repeated so much simply because they are very, very true. In the spirit of that quickness, I thought I'd pop in here and offer up a few arguably sparse updates in lieu of my somewhat moseying style.   In case you missed my little announcement, I've had one particular little thing on my mind lately: a baby ! My husband and I are expecting our first child at the end of January. Although I'm sure bits and pieces of that journey will end up here, I plan to keep this blog mostly place-focused. I'm writing for a pregnancy blog , too, though, so if you like yourself some baby and are interested in a different kind of (more personal! more crazy?) writing, then head over here and chec...

 I'm going to put on my teacher hat here for a moment. It was during my third semester in grad school that much of what I thought about and everything I wrote began to revolve around the notion of place. My classmates and I crafted critical theses that term, and mine focused on Minnesota writers and how these men and women rendered my state so convincingly. That paper was a labor of love, time, and too many notecards, so I'm grateful that a revised (and much shorter!) version of it is being shared with other writers and teachers of writing in the most recent issue of Minnesota English Journal .  If you're into that kind of thing, then by all means give it a read. Here are the first few paragraphs: "Landing: Writing About Place in our Flyover State" When I went off to college, I knew about Toni Morrison and Ernest Hemingway and  Harper Lee. I loved literature, so much that I wanted to both teach it and write it for the rest of my  life. But it wasn’t until I t...

Today I have returned to my students. I'm always surprised, after the exhaustion of spring, to discover how much I've missed them, how excited I am to be back in the classroom, teaching. I've spent the past month preparing for the next nine, and somewhere between notes on A Farewell to Arms  and rethinking my lead-in lesson on perspective, I reread the critical thesis I wrote two summers ago. I called it "Landing: A Focus on Place in Flyover Fiction." In it, I examined first place--how it's created in writing, effective techniques, etc.--and second those writers from my flyover state who seem to have a handle on such things. I wrote it as a writer for other writers. But this time, because of the headspace I was in, I read it as a teacher, and my planning from that day on changed. Later, I read in the most recent issue of Orion  Erik Reece's essay "The Schools We Need." He talked about many things, but the paragraph that stood out to me was th...

Continuing on with my Thirty Before Thirty list, I've spent several hours this past week reading Minnesota poet Joyce Sutphen 's 2000 collection Coming Back to the Body . The book was given to me on my 21st birthday by a fellow English major at Gustavus (thanks, Julie!), so I've read many of the poems before. I've since been told by poet friends, however, that though poems are entities unto themselves, a collection is formed intentionally, and should be read as a cohesive manuscript, cover to cover, at least once. So, this is what I've done, and upon finishing, it's clear that each of Sutphen's small creations builds on the next until the reader arrives at the last page with a clear emotional picture of a woman challenged and changed, someone who has returned to herself. Some of my favorite poems in the collection come from the first of the five sections--not surprising, as they explore the details of rural landscapes. But I was physically stopped at the...