The littoral zone is a place where water meets land.  Go a little deeper, though, and you’ll find the definition as squishy as the place itself.  I read it as meaning not one place and not another, and it is where I am in my writing today.  Somewhere between fiction writer and poet, trying to do both and hoping this isn’t hubris.

I began as a writer of stories.  Stories were what I read and so stories were what I wrote.  But in order to complete a Master’s program, poetry workshops were also required.  Poetry had always frightened me the way speaking French in France frightens.  But I found my workshop experiences exhilarating.  They were both stringent and fair, and I was hooked. I went to readings.  I read and read.  I learned the forms and recited poetry aloud.  In other words, it was my karaoke: strictly amateur, for awhile.  Soon I was publishing, and then a chapbook and then . . .

One day it was gone. Chops, gift, muse. Gone, and what I wrote felt like humping Victorian furniture into a pristine room.  Too big, too much, and where’s the music?  So I walked away.  I wasn’t alone.  Writers in MFA programs walk away after graduation, an army of them, once-poets.  Doesn’t mean you stop reading poetry; in truth, though, you do, a little. A falling off.

Then last year, cancer came into our lives like a meteor, hard and white-hot, but also, breaking up rocks.  And I began to write poetry again.  At first, short-lined pieces that read like chants and spells (which they were).

Meanwhile, there sat my stories, some of them published, others waiting.  How big they seemed.  How long the lines!  And so very obvious; you might say spelled-out.

For a while, I tried sitting in two chairs, one for poems, the other for stories.  Or I wrote on different days.  For poetry, I assumed another name.  But I hadn’t a switch, and still haven’t, to go with ease from one to the other.

Based on my very unscientific interviews, some writers never try switching forms, fearing to lose the gift they have.  Others dread writing poetic fiction and prosy poems.  I wonder, is that inevitable?  One bleeds into the other?  I read Elizabeth Bishop’s letters and her letters are poems, at least to me.  Is purity to be wished for?  One or t’other?  The devil or the deep blue sea?

Recently, a possible difference was borne home to me because of a series of dreams.  These were extreme and were accompanied by talking and walking in my sleep.  Angels swam down my hall each night.  Monstrous, thumping, Botero angels.

What I found on approaching these chimera is that poetry is a better space for them (the wet/salty end of the littoral zone?) than fiction.  As for dreams in fiction?  Mostly, people turn the page.  Someone once said that hell is where other people tell each other their dreams.  Forever.

I may be wrong about this, but at least I have drawn my line.  Around dreams.  As for the littoral zone?  Still a little squishy underfoot.