May Sarton

I appreciate May Sarton’s journals about living and writing on the coast of Maine. The personality that comes through in her entries is prickly, volatile, demanding of herself and others–not an easy friend or colleague, I suspect–but I love being allowed into another writer’s life through her words.

I have learned in these last years to forget the desk and everything on it as soon as I leave this room. The key to being centered seems to be for me to do each thing with absolute concentration, to garden as though that were the essential, then to write in the same way, to meet my friends, perfectly open to what they bring. And most of the time that is how it is.

-May Sarton, The House By the Sea

I like this statement as a goal–for writing, friendship, and life–in 2019. (Not for gardening, though, My father calls what I do “Darwin gardening”–toss something in a hole and see if it grows. Only the fittest survive.)