Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

Our text for the session was “Instructions on Not Giving Up” by Ada Limón.

Our prompt was: “Write your own instructions for not giving up.”

More details will be posted on this session soon, so check back!

Participants are warmly encouraged to share what you wrote below (“Leave a Reply”), to keep the conversation going here, bearing in mind that the blog of course is a public space where confidentiality is not assured.

Also, we would love to learn more about your experience of these sessions, so if you’re able, please take the time to fill out a follow-up survey of one to two quick questions!

Please join us for our next session Monday, August 3rd at 6pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions page.

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Instructions on Not Giving Up
by Ada Limón
 
More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.

Copyright © 2017 by Ada Limón. 
Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 15, 2017, 
by the Academy of American Poets.

Twenty-three people gathered together via Zoom to close-read Charles Simic’s 1938 poem “In the Library” and, after discussing the text, write to a prompt.

96% of participants revealed, via the NM survey, that they have participated in four or more of these NM live, virtual sessions, which, again tonight, brought together people from three continents. We love coming back together each Monday night, welcoming back our core group of veteran participants and welcoming new faces as well. Our community has grown with time, our bonds strengthened, and our eagerness to expand our narrative medicine family always growing.

After quickly reviewing the use of technology and the guidelines emanating from Narrative Medicine’s values of confidentiality and narrative humility: approaching texts with openness, welcoming diverse perspectives, and responding to each other with respect and specific references to what is “seen” and heard in each other’s writing.

As we did last week we co-constructed possible meanings in the text by offering each observation, intertextual association, or visceral reaction as “a piece of the puzzle.” The first piece of the puzzle attended to the title “In the Library” which locates the reader, as well as the speaker of the poem, in a library. (Many of us chatted our remembrances of libraries/librarians in our past or named famous librarians such as Jorge Luis Borges of Argentina’s National Library.) Later there was attention paid to being in the dictionary that was in the library where “[a]ngels and gods huddled [i]n dark unopened books” (books that are “whispering”) and how those words suggested a hallowed space. As we explored the space of the poem, we noted the how many languages come together within the library. For example, “the language of the library is silence”, but the “the language of books are words” that are being whispered to us as we browse through the space.

One person drew attention to the lines alluding to the prevalence of angels, in times past, being “as plentiful [a]s species of flies” making it necessary “to wave both arms [j]ust to keep them away.” Another person heard the speaker wishing for the special power of the librarian to hear what s(he) could hear. There was speculation about the identity of Octavio, to whom Simic had dedicated the poem. We agreed that there was not only a secret in the dictionary but also mystery in the poem to which we were not privy.  As we wondered what the books are whispering, we wondered also “what kind of deep listening is enough to hear what they are saying”. We noted that Mrs. Jones’ “head tipped as it listening” – what kind of gestures and adjustments are necessary for us to really listen to what’s around us?

We moved to the prompt: Write about what Mrs. Jones hears as she passes A Dictionary of Angels and wrote for four minutes.

Four participants read aloud. One person styled Mrs. Jones’s hair into a bun (and someone later added a pencil pushing through the bun!) and imagined her hearing an angel tell a joke. Another wrote as if she were the librarian and offered to be a witness to what the book held. One person expressed her desire for the angels to have stories. One narrative ended with a loose page of the dictionary floating down onto the surprised librarian’s feet—and left the reader to imagine what was on the page. Another writer had Mrs. Jones hear the angels murmuring, in ancient languages, doubts, kindness, peace, and “right wisdom.”

We thank you all for your participation and contributions to our collective puzzle. See you soon!

Participants are warmly encouraged to share what you wrote below (“Leave a Reply”), to keep the conversation going here, bearing in mind that the blog of course is a public space where confidentiality is not assured.

Also, we would love to learn more about your experience of these sessions, so if you’re able, please take the time to fill out a follow-up survey of one to two quick questions!

Please join us for our next session Wednesday, July 29th at 12pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions page.

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In the Library - Charles Simic (1938)

For Octavio
 
There’s a book called
A Dictionary of Angels.
No one had opened it in fifty years,
I know, because when I did,
The covers creaked, the pages
Crumbled. There I discovered
 
The angels were as plentiful                           
As species of flies.
The sky at dusk
Used to be thick with them.
You had to wave both arms
Just to keep them away.

Now the sun is shining
Through the tall windows.
The library is a quiet place.
Angels and gods huddled
In dark unopened books.
The great secret lies
On some shelf Miss Jones
Passes every day on her rounds.
 
She’s very tall, so she keeps
Her head tipped as if listening.
The books are whispering.
I hear nothing, but she does.

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

Our text was an excerpt from The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich, posted below.

Our prompt was: “Write about a quilt of dreams.”

More details will be posted on this session soon, so check back!

Participants are warmly encouraged to share what you wrote below (“Leave a Reply”), to keep the conversation going here, bearing in mind that the blog of course is a public space where confidentiality is not assured.

Also, we would love to learn more about your experience of these sessions, so if you’re able, please take the time to fill out a follow-up survey of one to two quick questions!

Please join us for our next session Monday, July 27th at 6pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions page.

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From The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich.

The sun flooded the sleeping floor of the old house. A few late flies banged against the window glass, or died buzzing around in circles on the floor. The top of the quilt was warm. Thomas removed his trousers and folded them along the creases to renew their sharpness. He kept a pair of long underwear pants under the pillow.

He slipped them on, hung his shirt over a chair, and rolled under the heavy blanket. It was a quilt of patches left over from the woolen coats that had passed through the family. Here was his mother’s navy blue. It had been made from a trade wool blanket and to a blanket it had returned. Here were the boy’s padded plaid wool jackets, ripped and worn. These jackets had surged through fields, down icy hills, wrestled with dogs, and been left behind when they took city work. Here was Rose’s coat from the early days of their marriage, blue-gray and thin now, but still bearing the fateful shape of her as she walked away from him, then stopped, turned, and smiled, looking at him from under the brim of a midnight-blue cloche hat, daring him to love her. They’d been so young. Sixteen. Now married thirty-three years. Rose got most of the coats from the Benedictine Sisters for working in their charity garage. But his double-breasted camel coat was bought with money he’d earned on the harvest crews. The older boys had worn it out, but he still had the matching fedora. Where was that hat? Last seen in its box atop the highboy dresser. His review of the coats with their yarn ties, all pressing down on him in a comforting way, always put him to sleep as long as he rushed past Falon’s army greatcoat. That coat would keep him awake if he thought too long about it.

From The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich. Copyright © 2020

Mary Sormanti welcomed 39 Zoomers into our Monday evening CELEBRATION OF THE 50^TH LIVE VIRTUAL NARRATIVE MEDICINE SESSION WITH THE WORLD IN ENGLISH. There were many familiar faces in our Brady Bunch boxes and new faces too. We usually begin by dropping into the chat where we are zooming from, but this evening we began by chatting one thing we are grateful for, as Mary reviewed what we have done together during these weekly gatherings:

• we’ve read poetry and excerpts from novels
• we’ve listened to poetry and music
• we’ve looked at paintings and photographs

And we’ve done all of this “closely”, “slowly” –  with great interest, curiosity and care – noticing textures and colors and mood, perspectives of space and time and many other things.

We’ve responded to all kinds of prompts. We’ve written about:

• “neighbors”       
• “clearings”     
• “awakenings”      and
• “choices crying to be taken”

We’ve written about:

• “shattering the silence” and
• “stepping into the sun” 

We’ve written about:

• “the frontline”
• “what we’ve found” and
• “what’s swirling in the air”

And perhaps above all we’ve listened to one another and to ourselves.

Meanwhile, appearing in the chat were participants’ words of gratefulness for:

Community

Connection

Family without conflicts

Friendly faces

Grace of this space

Immersion in arts

Insights

Interesting Ideas

Strangers who are no longer strangers

The space of a Clearing

Wisdom

Before turning to this evening’s text, Lynne introduced the idea of approaching the text as a puzzle and suggested that each comment would be a small piece of the “puzzle” we would assemble together. In Narrative Medicine we refer to the process as co-constructing meaning. We know before we begin that we will not “solve” a text as we intentionally choose texts that are inexhaustible.

A rich discussion developed in the shadow of Natalia’s sharing a screen with the image of a partially completed jigsaw with blue puzzle pieces and hearing two participants read aloud “Girls Overheard While Assembling a Puzzle” by Mary Szybist (posted below) The blues of sky and water and “the veins in my grandmother’s hands” drew us in. One person likened the poem to bodies of water that have no shape of their own but flow from place to place, taking the shape of their containers. We considered how the puzzle, which the girls were assembling, and the text, which we were puzzling over, needed to be shaped. That led one participant to comment on the importance of having a frame to work within and another to underscore the search for pieces that fit together. Early on, someone noticed that the form of the poem was that of an abecedarium—each line beginning with a letter of the alphabet in alphabetical order. She told us that this is an ancient form that appeared early on in Iran and in the Hebrew bible. There were wonderful intertextual associations to movies “A Wonderful Life” and “Wings of Desire.” While several people heard the poem as a stream of consciousness, others heard a conversation between girls. One person identified himself as a father who had overheard just this kind of exchange (associative, interrupted, broken lines) among his daughter and her friends. 

We were pulled deeper and deeper into the mystery of the text as the speaker of the poem depicts the girls wanting to enter the garden in the puzzle. One participant said that the girls want to understand what is “under the surface”—even “X-Ray” the action. Or, another said, (because that word, in particular, puzzled  readers, “X-Ray” was inserted into the poem to satisfy its abecedarian form?!

What images formed as participants worked in parallel with the girls? Although no specific image was described, several people saw “a classic image” or “something holy” forming.   

Before we “eavesdroppers” moved to our own writing, Natalia shared a screen with a mosaic of images (including the cover of Mary Szybist’s poetry collection Incarnadine) that many painters have rendered and titled: The Annunciation.

The poem’s attention to young girls, curious about sexuality, as they assemble a puzzle that several participants described as “holy” seemed to unleash playfulness and sexual language in writing to the prompt: Imagine, then write a conversation between angels.

One writer named her angels Electricity and Metallica and they, in turn, called their charges “homo fabrios” for all the trouble they can manufacture. Several other angels expressed worry and frustration and powerlessness as they recognized that they couldn’t protect humans, who had been given free will. In listening to each other’s writing, we heard the exhaustion of these guardian angels. In addition we heard and experienced the power of creativity, laughter, and a lightness that abounded. It was almost as if we had grown wings and our voices became a choir of angels.

Participants are warmly encouraged to share what you wrote below (“Leave a Reply”), to keep the conversation going here, bearing in mind that the blog of course is a public space where confidentiality is not assured. In commemoration of our 50th English Language session, our facilitation team selected their favorite 50 texts for Narrative Medicine, posted below, and we encourage you to share one or two of yours as well, along with your writing!

Also, we would love to learn more about your experience of these sessions, so if you’re able, please take the time to fill out a follow-up survey of one to two quick questions!

Please join us for our next session Wednesday, July 22nd at 12pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions page.

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Girls Overheard While Assembling a Puzzle
by Mary Szybist

Are you sure this blue is the same as the
blue over there? This wall’s like the
bottom of a pool, its
color I mean. I need a
darker two-piece this summer, the kind with
elastic at the waist so it actually
fits. I can’t
find her hands. Where does this gold
go? It’s like the angel’s giving
her a little piece of honeycomb to eat.
I don’t see why God doesn’t
just come down and
kiss her himself. This is the red of that
lipstick we saw at the
mall. This piece of her
neck could fit into the light part
of the sky. I think this is a
piece of water. What kind of
queen? You mean
right here? And are we supposed to believe
she can suddenly
talk angel? Who thought this stuff
up? I wish I had a
velvet bikini. That flower’s the color of the
veins in my grandmother’s hands. I
wish we could
walk into that garden and pick an
X-ray to float on.
Yeah. I do too. I’d say a
zillion yeses to anyone for that.

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Our Facilitator’s 50 Favorite Texts for Narrative Medicine

1. The Mississippi River Empties Into the Gulf by Lucille Clifton
2. The Last Remaining Speaker of Eyak Has Died by Michael Grabell
3. Girl by Jamaica Kincaid 
4. For Calling the Spirit Back from Wandering the Earth in Its Human Feet by Joy Harjo
5. Little Prayer- Danez Smith OCD by Neil Hilborn
6. Good Bones by Maggie Smith
7. Kindness by Naomi Shihab Nye
8. “Bone Box” from Body of Work by Christine Montrose
9. The Universe: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack by Tracy K Smith
10. 19 by Lawrence Ferlinghetti  (from A Coney Island of the Mind)
11. Lady Freedom Among Us by Rita Dove (from On The Bus With Rosa Parks)
12. Lights From Other Windows by Naomi Shihab Nye (from Words Under The Words)
13. Interrogative by Tracy K. Smith (from Duende)
14. September  1, 1939 by W. H. Auden (from Another Time)
15. The Departure by Rachel Hadas (from Laws)
16. Evening Walk by Charles Simic (from Sixty Poems)
17. Dead Doe by Briget Pegeen Kelly (from Song)*
18. Public Transportation by Elaine Sexton (from Sleuth)
19. Visions of Johanna by Bob Dylan (from Blonde on Blonde)
20. Musee des Beaux Arts by W. H. Auden
21. Peaches by Adrienne Su
22. The Hope I Know The Hope I Know by Thomas Centolella
23. The Artist by William Carlos Williams
24. Praise Song for the Day by Elizabeth Alexander
25. Those Winter Sundays by Robert Hayden
26. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong
27. Tamara’s Opus, spoken word performance by Joshua Bennett
28. The Mailman by Nazim Hikmet
29. A worker’s speech to a doctor by Bertold Brecht
30. The Chart by Rafael Campo
31. The Salon by Angelica Recierdo
32. A Sacred Place Never Spoken Of by Angelica Recierdo
33. Anosmia Collection by Vibhu Krishna
34. Days by Philip Larkin
35. Where I’m From by George Ella Lyon
36. In Shock by Rana Awdish
37. Los Nadies by Eduardo Galeano
38. Give Your Daughters Difficult Names by Assétou Xango
39. In Tennessee I Found a Firefly by Mary Szybist
40. Hairs by Sandra Cisneros
41. The Vantage Point by Robert Frost
42. Ode to a Pair of Scissors by Pablo Neruda
43. The English Patient (first page) by Michael Ondaatje
44. What Do We Have in Our Pockets/Etgar Keret
45. Tía José by Ángeles Mastretta
46. Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? (last page) by Lorrie Moore
47. Medical History by Eleanor Stanford
48. Monet Refuses the Operation by Lisel Mueller
49. Two Answers by Mark Strand
50. A Summer Day by Mary Oliver