It's nice to be read to when you are looking out the window.

I started by looking at the bare winter limbs of the trees, but became distracted by cloudy, white deposits on the glass instead, roiling folds of silt, salt fog gone crisp on the pane. That layer of pale sediment overlayed everything else. I thought about it as a series of physical waves, a spray through which you can glimpse the rest of the world, its solid forms, or a wave that carries the effects of time, time as a wave that moves through things, dismantling particles, causing forms to shuffle and slide. We are all underwater.

The piece being read was about improvisation. An exercise was described in which people who have grown familiar and relaxed in one another's company stand up and walk around the room, pointing at different objects and shouting out the names of things those objects are not. For example, you might point at a chair and shout 'mirror', or you might point at a pot plant and shout 'waterfall'. I'm not sure if abstract nouns are permitted, if you can point at a door and shout 'bemusement', or point at someone's puzzled expression and shout 'centimetre'.

After the reading, someone talks about the pace at which one writes. I am no longer looking out the window. I imagine writing at a furious pace to imitate insanity. Initially, I wrote 'an imitation of a semblance of insanity', and had to stop to think about what 'an imitation of a semblance' of anything might look like. Then I imagine writing about someone hunting a deer in a forest after a heavy rain. Everything is dripping. Everything is sharp and slow and clean. I write the scene over the course of six days, to imitate the glacial pace of the hunt.

In the room we are in, the blinds have been lowered half way so that we're spared the full wrecking ball of the early evening sun, but light still makes its way around the edges and through the gaps in the blinds. More waves. Gold splashes across people's faces as they speak. Most people in the room are feeling sleepy. It is as if we are all briefly blessed.