Recently I viewed an interview with Robert Hass, who won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for poetry for his book of poems entitled “Time and Materials.” He wrote these poems while carrying out the duties of the United States Poet Laureate. He called them a means of “checking in” with himself while fulfilling his public role.

That stopped me cold. I thought about the days when I filled notebooks with poems, short stories, essays, and more. And I realized it had been more than a decade since I “checked in” with myself. (more…)