I’m always good for 500 words. Maybe 900.  OK, I’m a babbler, I’m a show-off, I’m a Can-I-Post-Every-Night person.

I genuinely admire Carol Shields, but I couldn’t write one meaningful sentence last night. This morning I exorcised my demons by deleting my post on The Box Garden.

I want briefly to write about another of Shields’ poet heroines.  In her brilliant short story, “Segue,” published posthumously in Collected Stories (2004), the narrator, Jane, a slightly stooped, white-haired woman in her mid-sixties, is a well-known poet who writes only sonnets. Her husband, Max, a famous novelist, is roughly the same height, with the same signs of aging. But under the surface, they are as different as their chosen genres.

Jane has always written sonnets. She has never wanted to write in any other genre, she tells a reporter from the Chicago Tribune. For decades Jane has also chaired the Sonnet Society, known since 1988 as the Sonnet Revival.  And she is about to hand over the gavel to a younger poet, Victor Glanz.  No regrets.

Jane’s lucid explication of the demands of the sonnet is almost as useful as a poetry handbook. In a way, “Segue” is a short celebratory memoir of a poet’s life built on sonnets. And one wonders to what extent Jane’s passion for sonnets reflects Shield’s own fascination with fiction.

Jane describes her life as a “sonneteer.” Not a poet myself, I was absolutely fascinated.

I have attempted in my life- at least in the last thirty years – to write one sonnet every fourteen days, and it is my especial (see Fowler’s on the difference between especial and special) pleasure to spread the work out over the available working days.  On Mondays, usually in the early morning after the house has been set right, I decide on the form – Italian (for which I have a special fondness), Shakespearean, contemporary, or what I, and some of my colleagues, call essentialist. Surprisingly, this choice precedes the subject matter.  “But how do you decide exactly what to write about?” asked the Chicago Tribune journalist, Meg Alford, in her early spring article.

Throughout the story, Jane reveals the details of her creative process, including the discovery of her subject.  I am delighted by her remarks: “Half a dozen syllables in the third line are being withheld from me,” she writes at one point. And “My brain stem is ready, the iambic grasp of knit-purl engaged…”

Just as she closely observes her aging body, “this oiled goatskin I live inside of,” so she observes that her relationship with the aging Max has changed. They have grown apart. “Duo dinners” are excruciating: they force themselves to discuss the news. Listening to music after dinner helps. They return to their separate solitudes with relief.

But she maintains close contact with her daughter. This is the person she wants to know in old age, the person born of her body.

In a weird way, Jane’s life is like a sonnet, with room for only so many words, and perhaps Shields’ fiction similarly holds the borders of her life. “Segue” is one of her best stories. If only she could have hung on longer… Shields died of cancer in 2003.

If the information online is correct, and I can’t vouch for the sources, ‘Segue” was her last, or one of her last stories, written when she had cancer. And I think it is one of her best – worth hunting down a copy of Shields’ Collected Stories.