I am one who looks ahead.

I like to have an idea of what’s in my near future. It allows me to plan according to those events. Fall is my favorite season, my favorite time of year. It is, for me, the most romantic of seasons, the most inspiring, the most magical, and the most spiritually abuzz. I was born in October so I am, indeed, a daughter of autumn.

While camping and other summer outdoor activities are, in all likelihood, out of the question this year, I’m hoping that as fall rolls in, I can still get out and hike. I miss Silver Creek Falls like nothing else and I would like to make that hike at least once this year. I’m hoping, too, that the fires here in Oregon haven’t destroyed it since they were incredibly close to the park. My plan for fall, then, is to try and spend as much time outside in nature as I can. I miss the trees. I miss fresh air. My spirit needs the forest.

I’m also planning to give myself some heavy-ish poetry writing goals over October, November, and December. For October, my plan is 10,000 words of new poetry. Finishing 20,000 words of poetry over the month of July made big changes to my poetry. The more you do something, the better you get at it, right? This semester my creative writing has been somewhat lax, so I’m hoping to recharge it by writing 10,000 words of new poetry over my birthday month.

November is National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo. I’m not entirely sure if I want to try and write a fiction manuscript of 50,000 words or attempt a longer work of poetry for 25,000 words or do something completely different and work on a collection of essays for 50,000 words. I haven’t written any prose in months so part of me wants to take a shot at getting some prose written. Especially because I have a piece of poetic nonfiction from last semester that needs to be heavily rewritten and I’ve been thinking about how to begin, and this would give me that chance.

But I’m not sure I can sustain writing prose for 50,000 words at this point. There’s too much poetry inside of me. So I’ve considered setting my goal for 50,000 words, 25,000 of it for poetry and 25,000 for prose, but that feels excessive. It’ll be the end of the semester for me, too, and I don’t want to completely overwhelm myself with so much that I can’t get any of it done. Moreover, next semester is my last semester and I’ll be working on my creative thesis, which will be compiling a poetry manuscript, and I’d like to have as many poems to work with as I can. There’s a lot I thought I would write about over the month of July that I didn’t get to. November might be a chance for me to amp up those themes and get them onto the page.

I’m also looking ahead at what I’ll be reading over the next few months. I’m over halfway through Pride and Prejudice and I remember how thoroughly I love everything about this novel. I do not understand the people who love the Keira Knightley movie version of Pride and Prejudice. My guess is that those who love that movie haven’t read the book and so don’t/can’t know how wrong they are. It’s not only inaccurate to the book, it’s inaccurate to the time period. I love Keira Knightley (she’s my goddess), but she is not Elizabeth Bennet. And Matthew McFadyen is not Mr. Darcy.

If you want a movie version of Pride and Prejudice that isn’t 6 hours long but effectively captures the spirit of the novel, watch Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. I’m not even kidding, it’s a better representation of Jane Austen’s masterpiece than Joe Wright’s mortifying piece of self-importance. (He honestly believes that he brought the novel to life in ways no other director ever could. He thinks he modernized it and made it more nuanced than it ever was before. Which is another way of saying he thinks he made a movie better than the novel itself and I can’t abide that kind of white male patriarchal attitude.)

I intend to finish Pride and Prejudice this month. Then, I’ll be moving on to my last Austen novel, Mansfield Park. I’ve only read it once, surprisingly enough. My goal is to finish Mansfield Park before the end of November because I want to read Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey over the course of December. Something I want to play with in my poetry this fall is how to incorporate these novels and their characters into my work, how to dream myself into the lives of the writers, how to weave themes of loss, grief, heartbreak, death/mortality, love, and womanhood into my poetry in new ways.

Once I finish Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey, I’ll be moving on to a novel I haven’t read before, though I’m not sure which one. Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy, Middlemarch by George Eliot, and Mysteries of Udolpho by Anne Radcliffe are high on my list, but so are North and South and The Life of Charlotte Bronte by Elizabeth Gaskell and Jane Austen by Carol Shields. The last two are biographies of some of these amazing writers. I also have other works by Elizabeth Gaskell, Anne Bronte, Charlotte Bronte, Anne Radcliffe, Thomas Hardy, George Eliot, and other writers like Maria Edgeworth, Mary Shelley, Sir Walter Scott, and Charles Dickens. I also have a strong inclination to read all of Shakespeare’s work. And I’ve compiled the writings of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, two of England’s earliest recorded women writers. I’m not sure which ones I’ll read in 2021, but my goal is to always be reading something from British literature.

These are my tentative plans moving forward. I’m diving into the things that interest me and there I intend to immerse myself in the beauties of some of Britain’s best classical works. Hopefully I can see some of their craft manifest in my own creative writing.