Our workshop today included 18 participants from across the U.S. as well as
Angola, Athens, Bahrain, and Canada. The group engaged in a silent, slow looking at
the painting Profile/Part I, The Twenties: Pittsburgh Memories, Mill Hand’s Lunch
Bucket, 1978 by Romare Bearden. They then typed into the chat what they saw
immediately and upon closer study. Responses spanned form, function, and a range of
feelings. We noted human figures, open doors, a stove, big hands, multiple frames,
photographs and images, texture, scraps, a window, a ceiling, smoke, and pollution.
Deeper discussion explored what the layered collage’s elements represent — what
meaning could we make? Participants contrasted the flatness of the visual texture
(“water stains or wallpaper?”) with its movement (“almost chaotic”) with a blend of light,
shadow, hands (offering help, or reaching for help?), exploitation of labor, violence,
unspoken truths, family lineage, and a sense of shared experiences. One participant
recognized how multiple margins create a sense of self-referentiality – the process of
creating something despite the pieces refusing to cohere into a narrative. We were left
wondering: are estrangement and fragmentation connected, leading to alienation?

Our writing prompt, “Tell the story of a moment in scraps and remnants” inspired six
readers to share what they wrote in four minutes. The diverse responses included a list
of items that formed a collage, a palimpsest (a manuscript or piece of writing material on
which the original writing has been effaced to make room for later writing but of which
traces remain), and a car trip through Detroit (“Everywhere I lived or worked is
gone”…”Not ruins, something ruined”). Another writer picked up on the painting’s
intergenerational theme by recognizing a grandmother of 14 and describing a history
through war and across generations. The reading of the piece itself was noted as
sounding staccato, which added to the impact of listening. Imagery in other writings
brought to mind people, places and texture (“His hand, his garden, his flannel shirt”) as
well as purpose (a teacher surrounded by books, bricks, and students with a Pink Floyd
mindset “We don’t need no education.”) Our final writer-reader wrote about picking up
the pieces of memory – life’s moments floating away like a kaleidoscope flipping.

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, October 5th at 6pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions page.

Fourteen people gathered to discuss poet and psychologist Hala Alyon’s “Spoiler,” a poem published in today’s issue of The New Yorker. Via our weekly survey, we ascertained that all of this evening’s respondents have participated in more than four of our close reading and reflective writing sessions via Zoom on Monday evenings.

After listening to an audio recording by the poet, we silently reviewed this twenty-eight line poem, noting what called to each of us before beginning to share comments with the group.

When we did speak, more than one person said that the poem took them to diagnoses of breast cancer, sharing pain, and listening to others’ processes of living with thoughts prompted about the meaning of their lives. More than one person connected the multiple metaphors appearing in the poem and the multiple metaphors that are used by women living with cancer. One participant heard the poem as “dream logic.”

Other ideas that spoke to us suggested the constancy of “the tides,” that arrive on our shores–forces over which we have no control but which, in the face of, we persist. 

More than one person was attracted to the idea of banishing “nightmares” by naming our fears. 

Enriching our conversation through intertextuality, people quoted from classical texts by Ray Bradbury, T.S. Eliot, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Rumi. Someone suggested that Alyon’s poem “Spoiler” is “a feminist answer” to T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” 

“Quite the poem,” said one woman, who represented what many felt: Spoiler opens us to a strange mixture of anxiety, beauty, grief, pessimism, and peace. In thinking about what the future may have in store for us, we were prompted to reflect on the way we perceive the passing of time, including the “arrival” of the future. It was interesting to compare our modern framework to the way in which the Romans envisioned our relationship with time. Unlike what we think of today (we “look back” to the past and “ahead” towards the future), the Romans thought of themselves as walking with their front to the past (the only thing they knew) and with their back to the future (an uncertain prospect they had no clear view of, being behind). Would this different perspective change the way we think of the past? Would we look at what we’ve built so far differently it is was vividly in front of our eyes as we walk with our back to the future?

Three people read their four- minutes of writing, in the shadow of this difficult text, to the prompt: Write about what you might build knowing that it will be ruined. 

These works were filled with reflections on:

•  what has been ruined and why and what can yet be
• how homo sapiens sapiens (man who knows he knows) could also be called     
• “homofabulans” for our specie’s ability to imagine and archive stories
• the unasked for determinants of life and death and our need for meaning-making in “the gap,” the time and space between them

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, September 30th at 12pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions page.

Spoiler by Hala Alyan

Can you diagnose fear? The red tree blooming from uterus
to throat. It’s one long nerve, the doctor says. There’s a reason
breathing helps, the muscles slackening like a dead marriage.
Mine are simple things. Food poisoning in Paris. Hospital lobbies.
My husband laughing in another room. (The door closed.)
For days, I cradle my breast and worry the cyst like a bead.
There’s nothing to pray away. The tree loves her cutter.
The nightmares have stopped, I tell the doctor. I know why.
They stopped because I baptized them. This is how my mother
and I speak of dying—the thing you turn away by letting in.
I’m tired of April. It’s killed our matriarchs and, in the back yard,
I’ve planted an olive sapling in the wrong soil. There is a droopiness
to the branches that reminds me of my friend, the one who calls
to ask what’s the point, or the patients who come to me, swarmed
with misery and astonishment, their hearts like newborns after
the first needle. What now, they all want to know. What now.
I imagine it like a beach. There is a magnificent sand castle
that has taken years to build. A row of pink seashells for gables,
rooms of pebble and driftwood. This is your life. Then comes the affair,
nagging bloodwork, a freeway pileup. The tide moves in.
The water eats your work like a drove of wild birds. There is debris.
A tatter of sea grass and blood from where you scratched your own arm
trying to fight the current. It might not happen for a long time,
but one day you run your fingers through the sand again, scoop a fistful out,
and pat it into a new floor. You can believe in anything, so why not believe
this will last? The seashell rafter like eyes in the gloaming.
I’m here to tell you the tide will never stop coming in.
I’m here to tell you whatever you build will be ruined, so make it beautiful.

Published in the print edition of 
the September 28, 2020, issue of The New Yorker

Sixteen participants got up close and personal with Ted Kooser’s arachnid poem Daddy Long Legs. After listening closely to two readings, we discussed our overall impression of the work by noting words, lines and images that stood out. Some questions that were asked: What is a spider’s simple obsession—to find food and live? How does it relate to our obsessions? Can steel be springy? What is the poem really about, beyond an insect? One reader, drawing on a kinship with the book Charlotte’s Web, noted the paradox of the relative size/strength relationship of an ant, fly or spider: fragile/crushable yet so very strong. In the spirit of narrative medicine, it was also noted that close looking at insects (outside a poem) reveals their beauty and identity beyond pest status.

Several participants identified an affiliation with the spider and themselves (an easy grace, with our movement controlled by the center of ourself providing a calming balance) and also distinctions: what if we were unflustered by superficiality and could home in on being content with ourselves with love at the center?

The description of the spider reminded one listener-reader of another bug: a drawing of a virus that looks spider-like. This raised questions of vulnerability, mobility and motility: : are we more like a fly caught in a spider’s web, or when there is no web, what sustains us in addition to our thoughts? We came full circle by recognizing that the poem’s colloquial title was not universally accessible. The words “Daddy Long Legs” evoked thoughts of an ill father for one participant while for others it reminded them of an epistolary novel, a movie, and a stage musical. 

Our reflective writing was to the prompt: Write about a thought…caught

We had five writers share their reflections. One writing considered the moment we are now living in with COVID as a time that has caught us in a continued exploration of internal and external thoughts. Another writer saw the act of meditation challenging us to let go of our thoughts and breath. Following on this theme a writer likened a thought as “hooking a fat fish”, and considering whether to keep it or toss it back to “swim with our other random thoughts”. Another writer offered the idea of seeing in the eye of a beloved the depth of their love and wanting to be caught in the center of that loved one’s thoughts. And one writing took us into a dream of violence, where the killing of another provokes the question “am I perpetrator or victim?” and resolving with having been caught in this troubled thought until just now.

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, September 28th at 6pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions page.

Daddy Long Legs
by Ted Kooser
 
Here, on fine long legs springy as steel,
a life rides, sealed in a small brown pill
that skims along over the basement floor
wrapped up in a simple obsession.
Eight legs reach out like the master ribs
of a web in which some thought is caught
dead center in its own small world,
a thought so far from the touch of things
that we can only guess at it. If mine,
it would be the secret dream
of walking alone across the floor of my life
with an easy grace, and with love enough
to live on at the center of myself.

“Daddy Long Legs” from Flying at Night: Poems 1965-1985, 
by Ted Kooser, © 2005. 
All rights are controlled by 
the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA 15260. 

Seventeen participants joined this evening–some furnishing weather reports, purple clouds, a recent sighting of a rainbow–from PA, MA, NH, NY, Seattle (with newly smokeless skies), India, and England, where we hear another Covid-19 lockdown is coming. 

We come into this clearing reiterating our pledge to each other to contain what is shared here, making this “safe space” and acknowledging that it is also “brave space.” 

After two readings of an excerpt from “Sonny’s Blues” we waited and waded into the deep waters of this text and a scene of musicians warming to a collaboration of making music. Baldwin’s detailed description, through the eyes of the narrator, who studies Sonny’s face and Creole’s body language, as they begin to play in a trio or quartet. The narrator muses throughout about the effort of making music, of what creativity demands, of the hesitation to give voice to an instrument made of wood or wire, of how the musician must fill his instrument with his own breath, his life. As one participant noted the text is rooted “deep in the body.” Another expressed their awe for the “cultivation of inner listening” and “knowing to capture the magic in music” described in this piece.

As a group we wondered about the narrator, who begins this paragraph with the words, “All I know about music is that few people ever really hear it.” One participant immediately resonated to the idea of hearing and how that’s what we try to do in these sessions: bring our own associations and experiences to what the author writes and try to hear meaning. He thought perhaps the narrator was the bartender, who watches the musicians. Is he a failed musician?

This brought thoughts about how different it is to be in an audience or on a stage. How well-rendered art obscures the effort, the anxiety that the creator of art feels. Baldwin uses words like “torment” to get at the intensity of what can be felt in creating, in giving life to music–perhaps not unlike the birthing of a baby. 

One person imagined her way into Baldwin’s experience (knowing how difficult it was for him to express what he had to say) and suggested that experience helped him to imagine the musician’s task, in Baldwin’s words “More terrible because it has no words.”

Another person noted the extremes described: “terrible” and “triumphant.” 

There were also similarities we felt in the fluidity of the prose, the fluidity of musical notes merging, of water and air mentioned in the piece. A favorite metaphor was “deep water” and Creole’s wanting Sonny to know what he knew: being in deep water is not the same as drowning. In that way, with that knowing, Creole hoped to lure Sonny from the shoreline to the deep waters of jazz. 

After writing for 4 minutes to the prompt “Write about leaving the shoreline”, three participants read aloud their creative writing. 

One person read what sounds like a myth “of heaven and earth,” a “land of many shorelines,” and the gods’ mandate to liberate captives from Ahushdan, which is referred to, alternately, as “a literary place” and “a military place.” 

Another writer writes of the unfamiliar which is encountered when leaving the shoreline. Is there a destination or is there a venturing out to discover? Fear of “losing sight of the shoreline” is countered with the wish to stay “tethered to the shore.” One response to this reading began with a brave offering of a visceral memory of untying a rowboat from a riverside and being carried downstream, in a way that frightened the second grader, who ended up needing to be rescued. We learned that this participant tried again and again until able to reach the other side of the river. We acknowledged that many questions – unanswered and not – that emerge when we find ourselves about to cross the shoreline, pulled by the current and lulled by waves.

The third reading explored the shoreline itself–what is left on the shoreline, what of that is human refuse, and what is “undigested”?The sea is described as an “obedient” sea.Another keen listener questioned the qualifier “obedient,” saying that she never thought of the sea–that kills people–as “obedient.”

As promised, we are linking here a JAMA Perspectives piece about the shoreline, and what changes and what remains of the “shoreline” when our professional lives are threatened by “ocean waves” of unexpected catastrophic circumstances, as we do in the Times of Covid.

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, September 23rd at 12pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions page.

from Baldwin, James. “Sonny’s Blues” pp. 137-138.

All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it. And even then, on the rare occasions when something opens within, and the music enters, what we mainly hear, or hear corroborated, are personal, private, vanishing evocations. But the man who creates the music is hearing something else, is dealing with the roar rising from the void and imposing order on it as it hits the air. What is evoked in him, then, is of another order, more terrible because it has no words, and triumphant, too, for that same reason. And his triumph, when he triumphs, is ours. I just watched Sonny’s face. His face was troubled, he was working hard, but he wasn’t with it. And I had the feeling that, in a way, everyone on the bandstand was waiting for him, both waiting for him and pushing him along. But as I began to watch Creole, I realized that it was Creole who held them all back. He had them on a short rein. Up there, keeping the beat with his whole body, waiting on the fiddle, with his eyes half closed, he was listening to everything, but he was listening to Sonny. He was having a dialogue with Sonny. He wanted Sonny to leave the shoreline and strike out for the deep water. He was Sonny’s witness that deep water and drowning were not the same thing—he had been there, and he knew. And he wanted Sonny to know. He was waiting for Sonny to do the things on the keys which would let Creole know that Sonny was in the water.

  And while Creole listened, Sonny moved, deep within, exactly like someone in torment. I had never before thought of how awful the relationship must be between the musician and his instrument. He has to fill it, this instrument, with the breath of life, his own. He has to make it do what he wants it to do. And a piano is just a piano. It’s made of so much wood and wires and little hammers and big ones, and ivory. While there’s only so much you can do with it, the only way to find this out is to try and make it do everything.    

We welcomed 18 people to participate in our workshop’s close reading discussion of an excerpt from The Swimmer, a short story by John Cheever. Although the title and author had been withheld, some participants recognized the passage from the larger work. Others were unfamiliar with it, and this allowed for a variety of observations and perspectives. An initial response connected depression, seeking, and an unhappy life with the sense of running away exemplified by the odd goal to “swim across the county” by way of one backyard swimming pool after another. Our readers noted the disparities of a “stubborn autumnal fragrance… strong as gas” that conjured a toxic atmosphere. In addition, the analogy of a life being looked back upon through this self-imposed challenge was highlighted by phrases like, “looking over his shoulder he saw, in the lighted bathhouse, a young man.” Was our swimmer reflecting back on his youth when he recognizes the aging of his own body where “the strength in his arms and shoulders had gone”? 

There was “a ridiculousness” of this journey/challenge noted, and also the revelation that though we may set a goal and strive to achieve it, the achievement may not result in exaltation and a sense of triumph. It may sometimes result in the question “now what?”

Our writing prompt was an invitation to “Take us on a strange journey.” Four writers read their work. We entered the catacombs of Paris via a strange entrance, led by a cousin (referred to as a “loser”) wielding lanterns. This writer asked the question, “If we go into the depths can we be transformed?” The next writer took us on an immigrant journey where we heard “cries lost among others” where a great grandmother is embodied in the bowels of a ship, a visceral journey that makes vivid the depth of heritage. In the shadow of Cheever, the striving for a goal but not yielding triumph evoked a familiar feeling. Our next writer described how when walking the streets at night, she liked seeing “trees towering up to the heavens.” Then one tree struck by lightning smashes to the ground. In this turn of events, what started as NOT a strange journey became one. The writer’s repetition of “tomorrow/tomorrow/tomorrow” created a connection to the unknowable future. Our last reader personified a 2-year-old boy reflecting in a mirror where he saw “sclera lined with ripples of red,” a use of lens language that went beyond literal to metaphorical of how when we look at ourselves we may not actually see ourselves.

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, September 21st at 6pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions page.

Originally published in The New Yorker, July 18, 1964. Reprinted in The Brigadier and the
Golf Widow (1964) and in The Stories of John Cheever (1978). Copyright © 1978 by John
Cheever

“What do you want?” she asked.

“I’m swimming across the county.”

“Good Christ. Will you ever grow up?”

“What’s the matter?”

“If you’ve come here for money,” she said, “I won’t give you another cent.”

“You could give me a drink.”

“I could but I won’t. I’m not alone.”

“Well, I’m on my way.”

He dove in and swam the pool, but when he tried to haul himself up onto the curb he found that the strength in his arms and shoulders had gone, and he paddled to the ladder and climbed out. Looking over his shoulder he saw, in the lighted bathhouse, a young man. Going out onto the dark lawn he smelled chrysanthemums or marigolds—some stubborn autumnal fragrance—on the night air, strong as gas. Looking overhead he saw that the stars had come out, but why should he seem to see Andromeda, Cepheus, and Cassiopeia? What had become of the constellations of midsummer? He began to cry.

It was probably the first time in his adult life that he had ever cried, certainly the first time in his life that he had ever felt so miserable, cold, tired, and bewildered. He could not understand the rudeness of the caterer’s barkeep or the rudeness of a mistress who had come to him on her knees and showered his trousers with tears. He had swum too long, he had been immersed too long, and his nose and his throat were sore from the water. What he needed then was a drink, some company, and some clean, dry clothes, and while he could have cut directly across the road to his home he went on to the Gilmartins’ pool. Here, for the first time in his life, he did not dive but went down the steps into the icy water and swam a hobbled sidestroke that he might have learned as a youth. He staggered with fatigue on his way to the Clydes’ and paddled the length of their pool, stopping again and again with his hand on the curb to rest. He climbed up the ladder and wondered if he had the strength to get home. He had done what he wanted, he had swum the county, but he was so stupefied with exhaustion that his triumph seemed vague. Stooped, holding on to the gateposts for support, he turned up the driveway of his own house.