A Box of Bees

Hope you all had a fine Thanksgiving, and we won't get into Black Friday.  Let's just say I wrote a few poems about it, and studiously avoided all stores.

I wrapped up my five-event sprint with a week off, unplugged and recovering at home.  Catching up on the pile of paperwork I had been throwing in my apartment the past few weeks, I flipped through a journal picked up at the Florida writers conference.  I had forgotten about reading this interview, with Robert Birnbaum and author Sandra Cisneros.  In it, Ms. Cisneros admitted:

"I don't have very much contact with other writers.  I don't get invited to these things, or I don't go to them... It's very rare.  Even when I do these book fairs...I come in and I go out.  I can't hang around with lots of people these days because I am hypersensitive.  So when I am around a lot of people or a big roomful of people, I get almost autistic.  I get overwhelmed and really tired...

"I think because the kind of work...is so intensive with people that perhaps, whether you realize it or not, you are just absorbing everybody's buzz.  I feel like I am in a box of bees when I am in a room with lots of people and I'm just looking for the door."*

Sandra, you are not alone in the bee box!  Anyone else recognize the symptoms?! 

I had first read the interview after fleeing the conference, having absorbed way too much people buzz.  Sitting on a park bench in St. Augustine, I had laughed out loud in recognition.  Busted!

Very few people have articulated just what happens to the monastic inclinations of the average (introverted) writer, in the face of conferences, book signings and readings.  A box of bees.

Thank you, Sandra Cisneros, for your gift of words!  After a week off, I'm ready to emerge again.  Whether you like buzz or not, there is honey in that bee box!

Next event:  

Dec. 6: "PoeTea," 3:30-5:00 pm, at OM, 285 Lynnwood Ave., Tyrone, GA.  Readings, signing, poetry exercises, tea and light refreshments.  Sponsored by the OM Bookstore, with discounts for the season, so c'mon in, sip some tea, write a poem, and squeeze in some Christmas shopping to boot!




*From "Writers Ask," published quarterly by the editors of Glimmer Train Stories...a journal I've never succeeded in scoring an acceptance!   Issue #58, Winter, 2012, Glimmer Train Press, Inc.