I've never ventured to call myself a writer before, not really. Beyond a few poems I wrote in elementary school that now reside in obscure and expensive anthologies, I have nothing published. So, I have always said simply, that I write.
I write poems. I'm working on a play--really working on it, slowly but surely pulling on the threads of something. Perhaps short stories will occur.

I've been collecting inspiration all my life--I'll make useful, make it mine. And then, hopefully, people in the world will make it useful, make it theirs.

So, if only in my own mind at this moment, I am a writer.


Half the battle of life is claiming space--I've claimed. The sign on the door says Caitlin. The windows are letting the sun in; I can see the ocean.

Namaste.

I visited my grandparents this week in Arizona. I hadn't been in five years, since I was fifteen, and it looked exactly the same. There's something comforting about that--some things remain intact. I collected stories of relatives now long gone--my swedish and Irish ancestors. I drank tea everyday out of a teapot, made cake from a recipe Nana's carried around for fifty-eight years, discovered the magic of Greer Garson, reconnected with Danny Kaye as Hans Christian Anderson, fell in love with ballet all over again.
I hooked up a VCR, finished a book, introduced veggie burgers into a formerly carnivorous house, frosted a cake, became friends with my family, and watched Lawerence welk for the first time.
I have been interested in boundaries lately, boxes. The phrase that comes to mind most often is "war with architectecture." Fighting fate with muscle.

I want to write a play about the masks we wear, the different people we are on any given day. I am an old house, a tower of building blocks. They rearrange, fall down.
And memory loss. the kind that comes with not speaking.

I'm letting it simmer.

good night whoever you are. sleep well, dream of love.

--Rebellious, wished for child.