June 2, 2008 – An open life requires a fair amount of work, I think. I have no regrets about sharing my life in books and on this blog – well, maybe some regrets – but I guess the enterprise requires a periodic declaration of polices and procedures, which I truly hate doing, but seems necessary from time to time.

  So here goes, the monthly list of requests. I hope they don’t seem ingracious, but even if they do, they are necessary. Full disclosure – I got way too many packages this week and spent way too much money sending them all back.

– Please don’t send me things – artworks, quilts, winter clothes, biscuits, Hospice gifts, handwarmers, CD’s.  . . It is a growing problem for me, the Post Office, my house, Annie, my budget, to handle packages of things I haven’t asked for, don’t need, and resent having to handle, return and/or store.  I return all unsolicited packages, and this takes time and costs money.

– I welcome e-mail, and read as much of it as I can, although I can’t read or respond to all of it. I get several hundred e-mails a day, many with photos attached and I cannot download or read even a fraction of them. I do not respond – ever – to personal questions about my life, my family, my friends, current or former, or characters or animals in my books. I don’t give dog training advice, take photos on request, or help people find dogs or rescue them.
  I understand people may be curious but I don’t offer any information about my life beyond what I write in books or on this blog. Like everyone else on the earth, I am sometimes happy, sometimes not, and both are my problem.

– I don’t offer tours of Bedlam Farm or permit visits here. The farm is a workplace and a home, and visits are disrupting and distracting, to me, the animals and my neighbors. I do not agree to have photographs of me  taken on the farm. The farm does not sell wool, T-shirts, caps or any other souvenirs beyond the photos, which are sold to benefit Hospice ([email protected]). I don’t know the status of orders, nor do I have anything to do with subscription issues to the website.

  Many of my friends who are writers think me insane to put my e-mail in books, and to write regularly on this blog. I do not agree.
   I do not choose the cloistered life of the writer, holing up alone for months,  communicating with readers at wine-and-cheese-book events. I want to live in the world, and draw from it in my work, and this blog and your e-mail and stories help me immeasurably, and I can’t thank you enough. Your encouragement of my life, my farm, my photography, my writing has helped me and sustained me more than I can say.
  But I have to make choices all the time, like everyone, and I choose to live my life, not to sit glued to a computer or rushing to the Post Office every day.
  So just don’t send me things, okay? And I have plenty of friends.

  Yours in an open life –