Poet and Editor Balancing Single Mom Life and a Grad School Residency—Writer Diary
Adrie Rose is a poet, whose debut chapbook, Rupture, will be published in January 2024 by Gold Line Press. She works as editor of Nine Syllables Press, a chapbook press created in partnership with the Boutelle-Day Poetry Center at Smith College. Adrie is also an MFA candidate in Poetry at Warren Wilson College. Adrie lives next to an orchard in western MA with her two children, Jamie (16) and Gabriel (11). She is a full time single mom navigating the complicated world of chronic illness while also sending out queries for her first YA novel.
This diary represents a week of writing, reading, parenting, editing, and the first days of the grad school summer residency at Warren Wilson.
Monday, June 26th
6:30 am - wake up to my alarm and sit up in bed to FaceTime with my youngest child G, at his new camp. I drove him there last night. He’s weepy and missing me. I text him photos of our cats.
7:00 am- go on a bike ride, listen to Julia Louis- Dreyfus interview Fran Lebowitz about how great Manhattan is while I bike past cornfields.
8:00 am- stretch, breakfast, start laundry
9: 00 am- brush G’s angora rabbit while I attend the Zoom parent session for my oldest child J’s driving school.
10:00 am-still in driving school, go on Instagram to post a cover reveal sneak peek for the Nine Syllables Press anthology that we’re about to release. I’m the editor of Nine Syllables Press, which is a new chapbook press. We have our first chapbook contest this summer, and we’re about to put out this first anthology.
11:30 am- schedule appointment with the Boston Pain Clinic for J, tell them, no, I’ve already filled out the registration papers, tell them my child’s legal name vs preferred name. I spend a lot of time in phone calls like this. I text a list of important numbers to the mom of the friend J will be staying with while I’m away at my grad school residency.
12:00 pm - I go over proofs of my chapbook Rupture, which is coming out from Gold Line Press in January. I’m working from my bedroom (the only room with a ceiling fan) and the cat is absolutely thrilled.
12:30 pm - Call with a friend while I hang up laundry outside, eat lunch. Find maggots in the kitchen trash can. Swear a lot, take trash can outside and spray it out.
1:00 pm - Turn on ice cream maker. It’s friggin hot and our chickens have been laying tons of eggs, so I made ice cream custard yesterday and now I’m freezing the second half of it in our hand-me-down ice cream maker from the 70s. It weighs fifty pounds and I love it.
1:30 pm- Finish looking over the Rupture proofs and email my notes to the editors. Ice cream is almost done. I add black raspberries from the garden and mini chocolate chips. Scoop it all into a container, then into the freezer, clean the ice cream maker.
2:00 pm- Try to send a message to J’s pediatric neurologist, but somehow they’re not listed in J’s patient portal. Try to call instead. Get disconnected when I try to leave a voicemail. Call again. Talk with an incredibly sweet and helpful person who passes along my message to the on-call neurologist and promises we’ll get an email with info to finish setting up the patient gateway. Tells me, “Alright honey, have a beautiful day.” I nearly start to cry.
2:30 pm- Thunderstorm. Bring the laundry in quick. Sit on the front stoop and watch the storm for a few minutes with one cat who doesn’t mind getting wet, while the other cat sits in the window crying pitifully.
3:00 pm- I should revise my YA novel in this last half hour while J finishes driving school for the day. I take a nap instead. J and I both have a chronic health condition called Ehlers Danlos Syndrome (EDS). One of the main symptoms is fatigue.
3:30 pm- Pediatric neurologist calls back, we discuss options, new medications.
4:00 pm - Take J to therapy, run errands while he’s there.
6:00 pm- Sandwiches for dinner. Too hot to cook and trying to eat all the random stuff before I leave. Watch a show with J.
7:00 pm- Drive J to a friend’s house and go to my sweetheart’s house. When I walk in, there is an improbably large bowl of cantaloupe on the table and we laugh about it. He’s been away and then was sick for a week, I’m about to leave for ten days for grad school residency. We catch up. Another storm rolls in. We eat the melon (it’s delicious).
9:00 pm- Go home, brush teeth etc, putter around tidying up and waste some time on Instagram. G finally answers my earlier “how’s it going?” text at 9:46 pm with “Ok.” J comes home and we both go to sleep around ten.
Tuesday, June 27th
6:30 am- wake up thinking I should submit those Anthropocene poems as a packet to some lit mags, and possibly pull them out of my first poetry full length manuscript., FaceTime with G. He’s crying and hates camp. The counselor isn’t actually teaching anything, he wants me to drive two hours to come get him (then two hours home). Fuckity fuck. He was so excited for this camp. I text his dad (we’re divorced) and the camp director.
7 :00 am- Hoppin mad. Go on a bike ride, call a friend, rant and cry.
8:30 am- breakfast with J.
9:00 am- J has driving school via zoom, I have therapy on zoom.
10:00 am- call G’s camp Director. Sounds like they have talked with G already and maybe it’s going to be all right? Hard to tell. Load up trash and recycling into the car and take them to the dump. Take a Covid test and snap photos of it to upload for grad school. Turn on really loud music.
11:00 am - run errands in town. Go to CVS to pick up what is hopefully all the prescriptions J will need while I am gone. Stand in the aisle for way too long. Trying to figure out what face sunscreen to get. My brain is tired. Decisions are hard. go to get my eyebrows waxed because I am just vain enough to want to show up at grad school with decent eyebrows. I hardly wear make up and my morning routine would be laughable to anyone with an actual morning beauty routine, but this I can do.
12:00 pm - heat up tamales for lunch, shower while they’re cooking (at last!), eat while listening to Julia Louis-Dreyfuss interview Ruth Reichl.
12:30 pm- go through multiple doctor messages in J’s patient portal. Eat some of yesterday’s ice cream. Crack and freeze ten eggs from our hens that we clearly aren’t going to eat by tomorrow morning.
12:45 pm - Check in for my flight online and realize I’ll have to pay a $30 bag fee if I check a bag. Shit shit shit. Decide to put off checking in until I get some more work done and see if I can completely repack into a carryon bag.
1: 00 pm- Check the submissions to the chapbook contest for Nine Syllables Press. 40 submissions already, in our first month! Very exciting. Answer an email with questions about our submission process.
1:30 pm- repack everything into a carry-on bag while chatting with J, who is on a break. The camp director calls back and says G wants to come home. We talk for a while, she says she will call her regional manager and call me back. I squeeze conditioner and other liquids into tiny bottles. Have I written anything at all today? Shit.
2:00 pm- Call the drs office for the 4th time today, finally reach a person, schedule an appt for J. Open my submissions spreadsheet and log into chill subs and search for places to submit those anthropocene poems. Looking for places with no fees bc I am feeling very broke and also have spent a lot on submission fees this year already. I pull together three poems, and send them to The Baffler, Thrush, and The Nation (I know, hahahaha, but whatever, they were open and don’t charge a submission fee). Or rather, I try to submit to the Nation but their submissions manager says I already have an account, says it’s sent me a reset link, but it never arrives. Yes, I check my spam folder about fifty times. Finally give up and use a different email.
3:00 pm- Review edits sent by CALYX journalfor two poems coming out in the summer/fall issue.
3:30 pm- leave to drive to Boston to get G and drive back. Ugh.
8:30 pm - back home. Chat with Tim and J, eat a cookie J baked while I was out. Smoke alarm goes off. In bed by 10. The cat brings mice into the house three times in the middle of the night (through the cat door) and keeps waking us up with the squeaking and crashing around.
Wednesday, June 28th
5:45 am- wake up. Tim goes home to get ready, I get up and stretch, feed cats, feed chickens, put G’s rabbit outside. wake up J. Do some stretches since I’ll be squished into an airplane most of the day.
6:30 am - Drive J to his friend’s house, where he’s staying this week. Drive home, put a bagel in the toaster, double and triple check that I have all the essential items packed, do some jumping jacks to Aerosmith’s “Dream On.”
7:15 am - Tim arrives, I pop my stuff in his car, and we drive to the airport.
8:30 am- go through security. Open an email from Warren Wilson and realize I also forgot the copies of everyone’s poems for workshop, which I diligently printed out a month ago. They’re somewhere at my house. Ugh. Sit down at my gate. A rejection email from a lit mag awaits in my inbox.
9: 00 am -My cohort mate Carole texts me, bc they’ve just emailed us all our schedules, including which faculty will be workshopping us. “Have you seen?” she texts. “You will swoon.” She’s right, I swoon. Take motion sickness meds and work on revisions for The Chocolate Pirate, my YA novel. I sent out queries to agents two weeks ago and am trying to distract myself from checking my inbox every five minutes to see if anyone has replied.
9:35 am - wifi cuts out so I guess I’m done. Plane is about to board, anyhow.
10-1: 00 pm- I sort of nap on the plane. Sleepy and fuzzy from the motion sickness meds, and listening to an audiobook. I’ve already listened to many times before. Plane lands, haul my heavy bag throughout the Atlanta airport, get on the next plane.
1-2:00 pm - Our plane has a maintenance warning come up after we’re all on board, so maintenance folks come and try to fix it. I sleep for an hour, wake up and they’re telling us we have to get off this plane and onto a different one. While walking to the other plane, find five other people who are also on their way to Warren Wilson.
5:30 pm- Our plane lands just as a zoom call with J’s psychiatrist is supposed to start. I put in my airpods and log on. Psychiatrist says I need to be there but I can’t be there because I’m around other people. I tell him I’m on a plane, we just landed. He tells me to log off. I do, and try not to cry. J texts me 10 minutes later and says the psychiatrist didn’t listen to him at all and suggested a medicine that he doesn’t want. We text back and forth as I am getting off the plane and finding the other Warren Wilson folks, so we can ride to campus together.
6:00 pm - Super nice fellow Wally who has a car comes to the airport and drives us back to campus. We get our room keys and badges and arrive just as the welcome reception is ending. I see members of my cohort, lots of hugs and exclamations, we walk over to dinner and eat together. Campus is beautiful, the breeze is cool.
7:30 pm - my fellow late arrivals and I take our luggage to our rooms. I’ve got no sheets or towels in mine. I FaceTime with G for a few minutes. I email the admin person about my lack of sheets and walk back to the main building.
8-9:00 pm- readings by faculty. Really beautiful work. I talk to the admin person, and we go over to the office and get sheets etc. I walk back to my dorm, unpack a little, brush my teeth etc, go to bed. There are people partying at another dorm. Last year I hardly slept, this year I’m in the quiet dorm. It’s great.
Thursday, June 29th
6:00 am- I forgot to turn off my regular alarm. I meant to sleep until 7 but looks like I’m up. Do some Instagram work for Nine Syllables Press, text friends, shower etc. , do some stretches.
7:30 am- Breakfast at the dining hall. I sit with folks from my cohort, chat about writing routines at home, how to find the time, how to continue bring feedback on our work after we graduate.
8:30 am- Sit in the sun and wait for the library to open so I can print out the poems for workshop.
9:00 am - Print. There’s a sign next to the computer that says “Please don’t print out whole books. Library Jesus thanks you.” Sit outside and read through all the poems again and make notes on them.
10:30 am - Opening remarks and info from retiring director Deb Alberry, talk on raja theory and centering emotions in writing from our new director, Dr Rita Banerjee.
12:00 pm - Lunch, talk with another poet about reading manuscript submissions for contests.
12:30 pm- Walk back to my dorm to get my laptop, lay down for ten minutes in a quiet dark room, walk back.
1 - 3:00 pm - talk by Gabby Calvocoressi on Mary Oliver. Gabby announces first that affirmative action has just been struck down by the US Supreme Court. I try to focus on the talk while also reading the news.
3-4:30 pm- Talk outside with a friend from my cohort about permission to work with archive and stories that are ours and not ours, the impossible job of parenting, and trying to tell the truth in our work and our lives.
4:30 pm- All the new students give a reading for all the other students. This is one of my favorite parts of the residency. We also discuss gifts for the retiring director, and the upcoming official “secret” party.
7:00 pm- Dinner
8:00 pm -We find out our supervisor for this upcoming semester, then another reading by faculty. Briefly meet with our super group (our supervisor and other advisees) to set a time and place to meet tomorrow.
9;45 pm- back to my room, brush teeth etc, go to sleep
Friday, June 30th
5:00 am- wake up. Try to go back to sleep but no dice. Look through texts that arrived while I was sleeping. Listen to an audiobook to try to get back to sleep. It sort of works.
7 :00 am- alarm goes off and I get up. Get dressed, do some stretches, call J, and ask about how it’s going.
8:00 pm - Breakfast. Meet new people and catch up with cohort mates. Talk about how you have to be telling the truth in your life in order to tell the truth in your work.
9:00 am - work on greensheets - written responses to classes we all have to turn in at the end of the residency.
9:30 am- class with Christine Kitano on lineage in the practice of writing. I get a rejection email from a lit mag while in class.
10:30 am- on break, I post to Instagram for Nine Syllables Press
10:45 am - next class, Nina McConigley talking about retrospective narration.
11:30 am- Lunch - I get mine in a to go box and take it back to my room. I eat then lie down, set a timer to wake up in time to get to the next class.
1:00 pm - Go to a class taught by a graduating student, on the voice and its materiality, its physical presence in poems. I love getting to hear students teach. We watch a video of Douglas Kearney read his incredible poem “Sho.”
2:00 pm - Another class taught by a graduating student. This one is titled “Against Selfhood” and is about the presence of the self, and the impulse to move beyond the self in art, particularly poetry. We talk about Fernando Pessoa, who created 75 heteronyms that he also wrote under!
3:00 pm - I fill my water bottle and walk outside. I think it’s time for my supervisor meeting but actually I have 30 minutes. One of the poetry faculty comes up to say hi and tells me she likes my work and thinks I would enjoy reading BK Fischer, especially St Rage’s Vault. She says she’s going to go on a quick walk around campus and invites me to join her. I do.
3:30 pm - I meet with my super group - my supervisor and the other two advisees. He tells us about the semester ahead, how he likes to work, how we’ll communicate. He has us share advice with each other (especially the students further along in the program). He asks us to bring a list of 5-10 books we want to read this semester to our next meeting, and he’ll put together recommendations for us, also.
4:00 pm - Walk back to the dorms with a friend from my cohort. Talk with her about her work with DEI in the program.
5:00 pm - How is it 5 already?? The traditional softball game is starting right now but I go back to my room and type up a greensheet (the written responses to all the classes we have to write) and write this down, before I forget everything. I have three more greensheets to write from today alone. Oof. I lay down for 20 minutes.
6:00 pm - Out to the ballfield. I get dinner and yell encouragement from the sideline. The poets almost win, but alas, the fiction writers win again and chant “par-a-graphs! par-a-graphs!”
7:00 pm - Back to my room. Rinse off with a quick shower, and try to FaceTime with G but he doesn’t answer. Type up another green sheet, walk back.
8:00 pm - Readings by faculty.
9:30 pm - back to my room, brush teeth etc, call with my sweetheart, take two melatonin, sleep.
Saturday, July 1st
7: 00 am- Wake up, get ready for the day.
7:30 am- Meet a friend and go into breakfast together.
8:00 am- Yoga out in the pavilion. Sitting in a chair all day combined with the steep hills has me sore in odd places.
9:00 am- Walk back towards the classrooms. Facetime with G, who asks me, crying, “What do I do to not miss you so much?”
9:30 am- First class with Vanessa Hua on linked story collections, different strategies for connecting them.
10:30 am - Second class with Alan Williamson, on twisting common idioms in poetry.
11:30 am- Lunch
1:00 pm - Graduate student class on rhythm in poetry, how it differs from meter, and how to use it to create and subvert comfort for the reader.
2:30 am- First day of workshop. Two poetry faculty oversee our group, and we workshop two poems each for two students, with a break in the middle.
4:30 pm - go back to my room for peace and quiet before dinner. I should type up a greensheet but I need to not think for a little while.
5:30 pm - Dinner, end up sitting next to my supervisor, and so at the end of dinner he says, “Do you want to just have our meeting now?”
6:30 pm - Find a quiet table downstairs and talk with my supervisor. He asks for my writer origin story. We talk about what I want to work on this semester (long poems), the books I want to read, and suggestions he has. He’s very excited to talk about poem sequencing.
7:30 pm - Quick walk with a friend around campus.
8:00 pm - Faculty readings
9:00 pm - Reception for the new director
9:30 pm - A bunch of my cohort take our glasses of wine and walk down to the river. A few people get in the water but most of us just sit and look at all the fireflies.
11:30 pm - Walk back, go to sleep.
Sunday, July 2nd
7:30 am- Wake up, shower, get dressed.
8:00 am - Have breakfast with a cohort friend, then take a walk with her down by the river.
9:20 am - FaceTime with G before class.
9:30 am - Class by C Dale Young on using doubt and uncertainty in a poem to create trust in a reader.
10:45 am - Class by Lesley Arimah on using pragmatic questions to guide revision.
12:00 pm - Lunch. Quickly type up a greensheet. I’m way behind on these.
1:00 pm - DEI class on language and exile. Fantastic.
2:30 pm - workshop- my poems get worked today. I’m so nervous going in because the two faculty overseeing my workshop are poets I hugely admire. It goes really well.
4:30 pm -meeting with faculty to talk about the second semester
5:00 pm - Dinner, sitting outside
6:00 pm - Walk back to my room, unpack my heavy laptop from my bag, start a load of laundry.
6:30 pm - Meet with my cohort in one of the dorm living rooms. We all read a bit of our work out loud.
7:30 pm - Walk back towards class, sit outside for a few minutes. Thunder but no rain today.
8:00 pm - Faculty readings. A friend passes around sour patch kids because we’re all so tired.
9:00 pm - Dance party. I’m hyped on sugar and dance a lot longer than I thought I would.
11:30 pm - Walk back to the dorms, brush teeth, sleep.
