We welcomed 26 participants from across the U.S., Canada, France and India to our virtual workshop today, with many returning and several newcomers. Inspired by the recent “Creative Impulse” weekend workshop, we departed from our traditional visual text format and listened to “Steroid-Induced Gastronomy” an episode from CHONY Corps, a new podcast series created by MS alum and pediatrician, Anoushka Sinha.

We played the 5-minute recording just once, asking participants to listen closely and jot down words, phrases, imagery and sounds they heard. Then we invited them to write for 3 minutes the story that they heard. Some participants shared what they wrote, and these writings focused on themes of creativity, determination, relationships and resilience. It was noted that the boy, Jake, though only 10, seemed wise beyond his years, exploring his experiences with food and taste during his treatment with curiosity and the irony of how he had changed since he was ”younger”. It was observed that only his mother spoke of his treatment-related symptoms of bad tastes and mouth sores, which drew an arc for the listener between child, food, and illness recognizing food as a gift of strength. One participant observed the background music of a xylophone seeming to be childlike, or a soundtrack to a children’s story. The preparation and sharing of food within the family was likened to a “table of ministry.”

After the story sharing, we opened it up for a group discussion. One participant noted with interest how differently some people had approached the writing exercise: from a historian’s point of view it was about documenting a series of events while others interpreted what they heard instead. Several physicians spoke to the importance of engaging a patient to talk about what they’re interested in as presented in this podcast. Jake’s acknowledgement that food “doesn’t just appear” (once he slowed down to appreciate it and cook for himself) reminded us that we could better appreciate his story once we slowed down and listened to it, uninterruptedly. Finally, it was also clear that love is often shown through food, as Jake and his mother had no trouble in declaring their love and mutual pride in each other’s strength and support.

Our writing prompt, “Write about a hunger,” inspired a variety of forms and creative expressions: a list that reminded us of a recipe or a children’s book with its repetition and rhythm, an introspective look at one’s privilege of being able to care for others while defining success by one’s ability to guarantee survival, a medical-care memory of a surprise reunion and a miracle of hope,  a search for tranquility marked by “growling words,” and a visceral description falling asleep with a full belly: reality or folly?

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, November 2nd at 6pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions page.

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

Our text for this session was the poem “Answers” by Mark Strand, posted below.

Our prompt was: “Write about a time you had two answers to the same question.“

More details about this session will be posted 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 Wednesday, October 28th at 12pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions page.

 Answers by Mark Strand
 
 Why did you travel?
 Because the house was cold.
 Why did you travel?
 Because it is what I have always done between sunset and sunrise.
 What did you wear?
 I wore a blue suit, a white shirt, yellow tie, and yellow socks.
 What did you wear?
 I wore nothing. A scarf of pain kept me warm.
 Who did you sleep with?
 I slept with a different woman each night.
 Who did you sleep with?
 I slept alone. I have always slept alone.
 Why did you lie to me?
 I always thought I told the truth.
 Why did you lie to me?
 Because the truth lies like nothing else and I love the truth.
 Why are you going?
 Because nothing means much to me anymore.
 Why are you going?
 I don't know. I have never known.
 How long shall I wait for you?
 Do not wait for me. I am tired and I want to lie down.
 Are you tired and do you want to lie down?
 Yes, I am tired and I want to lie down. 

After close reading the poem “Enough,” by Suzanne Buffam, our group discussed its voice, content, form, tone, and symbolism, starting with a question about the narrator’s identity: Whom do we visualize? What do we know? A range of interpretations emerged: a (suburban?) female trapped in that role, wanting to start over and not live by convention, and who wants to talk about her suffering because she’s ready to explode. Perhaps the talking is a remedy for what’s bottled up: a legacy of rage, an inherited setback (victimhood or depression?) that challenges her to work it out for herself. We also saw the narrator as a traveled sophisticate, one who employs dark humor and wears dark glasses indoors, like a superpower or shield. 

Participants found several cues and clues in the poem that suggest a longing for mobility and departures: an ant drawn home along a destined path, a train in motion, and a powerful juxtaposition of natural elements. The form of the poem was described as a stream of consciousness built by a series of 2-line stanzas that embody both rupture and continuity. 

“Write about something passed down through your family” was our prompt, and writers employed a variety of forms, themes, voices and details. Our first response constituted a listing of events or attributes, without verbs, leaving us to imagine more about the identity of the narrator. This raised the idea of how our identity might be constructed through items and events. The events seemed to connect to family like talismans that carried the family into the future.

Another participant described a silver bracelet and from there took us on a spatial and temporal journey imbued with ritual that ended with the hope of revisiting a mountain with children in the future. A third participant described a firewall – or maybe a fire wall – that we could feel viscerally, moving through time.

We also thought about the attributes that we learn from the people with whom we grow up, and how we go back to those lessons when we confront trouble even after we’re grown ourselves. Here and elsewhere, we observed how the prompt asked for “something” that was passed down, but that at least sometimes, a single thing being passed down would not be enough to represent the whole of what we take from those who came before us.

Our final writer raised the question of how we can be tethered to the things we inherit, even if they’re tucked away under a bed. It reminded one participant of the way Jewish Europeans almost always had a violin, no matter how poor they were, so the love of music was handed down from generation to generation.

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 26th at 6pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions page.

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Enough By Suzanne Buffam
 
I am wearing dark glasses inside the house
To match my dark mood.
 
I have left all the sugar out of the pie.
My rage is a kind of domestic rage.
 
I learned it from my mother
Who learned it from her mother before her
 
And so on.
Surely the Greeks had a word for this.
 
Now surely the Germans do.
The more words a person knows
 
To describe her private sufferings
The more distantly she can perceive them.
 
I repeat the names of all the cities I’ve known
And watch an ant drag its crooked shadow home.
 
What does it mean to love the life we’ve been given?
To act well the part that’s been cast for us?
 
Wind. Light. Fire. Time.  
A train whistles through the far hills.
 
One day I plan to be riding it.


Source: The Irrationalist (Canarium Books, 2010)

At least two new people joined our group of 21 participants tonight as we gathered around a poem by William Carlos Williams. People chatted in greetings and weather reports from MA, ME, NJ, NY, OR, PA, RI, TX, India and Canada, before discussing elements of the “The Artist,” noting the surprising balletic movement of Mr. T, a man in seeming disarray. We identified four people in the space of the poem – the speaker of the poem, a woman who is identified as “my mother,” the de-identified “Mr. T” and his wife. Mr. T is presented as “bareheaded in a soiled undershirt, with his hair sticking out on all sides.” Has he been wearing a hat? Has he been working, or is he known for neglecting his “toilette?” No matter: with no introduction or visible cue or musical accompaniment, he executes an entrechat bounding into the air and “whirling about” in an instant. We commented on the shape of the poem on the page: “centered” on the page and its short lines leaping. One person related this telling to a Lewis Carroll text, which she had recently read, about elderly people who perform remarkable physical feats. One participant commented that he, initially, entered the text as the woman described as an “invalid”. And then began to identify as the artist looking at that woman and deciding to perform. Before returning to what transpires in the text, we commented on the poet, William Carlos Williams, known for his practice of writing as well as his practice of medicine in Paterson, NJ.

We noticed that the poem begins in third person (describing Mr. T) before switching (whirling about) midway to first person as the speaker calls attention to “my mother” who, before exclaiming, “Bravo” is stunned into wordlessness at what Mr. T wordlessly communicates.  This brought our attention to what is given and what is received in every performance.

One participant had a strong reaction to the fourth person who makes an appearance in the poem: “[t]he man’s wife who came in from the kitchen.” She asks if the wife misses what merited applause because she has been working in the kitchen. Whatever the reason, she misses the brief beauty. In the poem, the wife’s “work” is to orient readers to space, suggesting that the action takes place indoors rather than out-of-doors as many people sensed at the beginning of the read. Other than the cry “Bravo” the wife is the only character with a spoken line. “What goes on here?” she asks before the poem ends, “But the show was over.”

            Our session was not over. Given a choice of prompts: Write about an unexpected moment of beauty or Write about a missed performance, we all wrote for four minutes. Four people read their work. One was about the camera on their iPhone being a constant companion and, yesterday, looking into the sun, being blinded by the sun, they took a leap of faith and took a photograph. There was also reflection on the possibility that a camera interferes with pure looking at moments of beauty. One participant commented on the author’s openness and expectation of finding beauty. Another noted that she had re-captured the image in words. The second reader had written about a walk in the woods in search of autumn leaves falling and leaving their impression on the ground. This piece contains dialog between two hikers, about which trail to take, when coming upon markers. The authors of these first two readings both shared the images they had caught on camera.

The third reading was a reflection on missing a performance: parents’ performance that led to conception. There was much amusement and also some discomfort, as participants contemplated or avoided contemplating their own beginnings.

The fourth and final reading, this evening, sounds like a play or film with two residents in a nursing home talking about the images one of them sees on the wall of their room.

Thank you everyone for bringing so much to the discussion of text and for sharing your prompted writing.

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, October 21st at 12pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions page.

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The Artist by William Carlos Williams

Mr. T.
          bareheaded
                    in a soiled undershirt
his hair standing out
          on all sides
                    stood on his toes
heels together
           arms gracefully
                    for the moment
curled above his head.
            Then he whirled about
                     bounded
into the air
             and with an entrechat
                     perfectly achieved
completed the figure.
             My mother
                     taken by surprise
where she sat
             in her invalid’s chair
                      was left speechless.
Bravo! she cried at last
             and clapped her hands.
                       The man’s wife
came from the kitchen:
            What goes on here? she said.
                        But the show was over.

We welcomed 21 people to our virtual workshop session, including many returning participants and two newcomers. The text today was a pastel artwork by Richard Wommack, “Television Snow.” With intent, the title was withheld from the participants, who were asked to spend 2 minutes close reading the painting. Then in a break from tradition, participants were asked to consider what the title of this painting might be and to type their thoughts into the chat.

Here are just a few of the many responses: Empty Spaces, The Puzzle, Backyard Monotony, Ghost ‘burbs, Sweet Dream, Fordist Neonscape, Uniformity & Catastrophe and Radioactive Neighborhood. In the discussion that followed, feelings of isolation, sameness, and even danger due to the lack of fences were shared. Several noted the lack of human form and nature, though a sliver of purple sky was observed. The color purple that glowed was seen as either comforting or toxic. The arc of the scene and preponderance of pools (or were they basements minus rooves) prompted discussion of the surreal and dream/nightmare quality of the art. The mood was eerie, dystopian and even angry. Someone noted that this depiction of night felt like the lonliest of times, that though there were no fences to divide the inhabitants they were separate and not communicating, each in their own “castle”. The sense of smell was explored eliciting chlorine, ozonate, metallic, or simply nothing. Finally we “listened” and heard crickets, radiostatic, white noise and silence.

Writing to the prompt “Take us someplace after hours” brought us to internal spaces of “a desperate desire to matter” and an external space where “The night is about to settle…lawnmowers, leaf blowers…the stars would gradually accompany me with their stories as I arrived home.” One writer described a long day with a patient followed by dizziness and blindness that muddles our memory; another wrote a dialogic scene with two rocks in conversation that asked “Was there any life before we came? Are we the only stones to people this land?” Another writer in a medical context described “ears filled with beeps, my heart broken with death.” The group resonated with the description of stepping outside a hospital into the crisp air, a feeling like a resuscitation. Our last writer described a peaceful pandemic space (her daughter’s former bedroom) where she can “lower the light..light  my candle.” 

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 19th at 6pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions page.

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Sixteen participants from India, Maine, Mexico, Michigan, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania—one who was new to our circle—gathered to close read the poem “Snow Mare” by N. Scott Momaday, cognizant of today’s holiday that celebrates indigenous Peoples. Momaday is a member of the Kiowa nation. He is best known for his novel House Made of Dawn, which won the Pulitzer Prize, although he prefers to be recognized as a poet.

The words and phrases that called many people’s attention included:

            bursts of soft commotion

            the burden of being 

(Sorry, everyone, the capitalized “Of” was our transcription error.)

We discussed color, properties of hardness and softness, verbs of being, memory, and the dissolving nature of dreams and memories. We imagined porcelain fields and dreams that bring comfort, all in a background of confectioners’ sugar and gentle hooves. Tonight we also generated a sizeable number of auditory, visual, and literary texts elicited by Momaday’s:

            The Dream of the Blue Turtles (Sting)

            Blue Horses (Mary Oliver poetry collection)

            Big Blue Horses (Franz Marc)

            The Snowman (Wallace Stevens)

            The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Kundera)

Three people read what they wrote to the prompt: Write about bursts of soft commotion.

Each were scenes involving children—a child’s near-death experience of eating/inhaling flour; children romping and squealing in a park; “brain bursts” after falling on ice. One person noted that Momaday’s line “She shears the web of winter” brought her back to last week’s text – Pablo Neruda’s Ode To A Pair of Scissors. We were sorry to lose our fourth reader to an interrupted internet connection. Perhaps she will post her writing on the narrativeblog.com.

Tonight’s session concluded with a three-minute trailer, from a documentary on N. Scott Momaday featured at the Seattle Film Festival in 2019, which is titled “Words from a Bear.”

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 14th at 12pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions page.

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The Snow Mare by N. Scott Momaday

In my dream, a blue mare loping,
Pewter on a porcelain field, away.
There are bursts of soft commotion
Where her hooves drive in the drifts,
And as dusk ebbs on the plane of night,
She shears the web of winter,
And on the far, blind side
She is no more. I behold nothing,
Wherein the mare dissolves in memory,
Beyond the burden Of being.

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

Our text was the poem “The Death of Marilyn Monroe” by Sharon Olds, posted below.

Our prompt was: “Write about a time you stood in a doorway.”

More details about this session will be posted 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, October 12th at 6pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions page.

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The Death of Marilyn Monroe  by Sharon Olds

The ambulance men touched her cold
body, lifted it, cold as iron,
onto the stretcher, tried to close the
mouth, closed the eyes, tied the
arms to the sides, moved a caught
strand of hair, as if it mattered,
saw the shape of her breasts, flattened by
gravity, under the sheet,
carried her, as if it were she,
down the steps.

These men were never the same. They went out
afterwards, as they always did,
for a drink or two, but they could not meet
each other’s eyes.

                             Their lives took
a turn--one had nightmares, strange
pains, impotence, depression. One did not
like his work, his wife looked
different, his kids. Even death
seemed different to him–a place where she
would be waiting,

and one found himself standing at night
in the doorway to a room of sleep, listening to a
woman breathing, just an ordinary
woman
breathing.



"Death of Marilyn Monroe," by Sharon Olds 
from The Dead and the Living (Alfred A. Knopf).

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

Our text was the poem “Ode to a Pair of Scissors” by Pablo Neruda, posted below.

Fourteen participants gathered in the clearing this evening, arrived from around the globe (like the well-traveled scissors in Neruda’s ode) representing Bar Harbor, central Pennsylvania, Detroit, India, Manhattan, Montreal, Philadelphia, Pittsford, Sao Paulo, and Staten Island.

Two people read aloud this ode, an extended metaphor that fell down the page. One of the first comments made, after hearing the escapades and serious functions of scissors, was that it will be impossible to ever again look at a pair of scissors in the same way—which is often to take them for granted. Yes, “them”–two blades united in an instrument that cuts.

Neruda left a litany of objects: fabric such as bridal gowns, diapers, suits, and shrouds; fingernails, flags, flesh, hair, knots, and umbilical cords, abstractions: happiness and sadness cut by scissors that look like  birds or fish or schooners or shining armor. as they cut “the fabric of our lives” from cradle to grave.  

In drawing our attention, which someone described as a “close up” of a common thing

To several participants the most puzzling: scissors that fold and fit safely in a pocket. One participant said that she had a pair of folding scissors. One of us remembers “bandage scissors” with one angled/blunt edge that we, as student nurses, kept in a uniform pocket years ago. Safe to tuck into a pocket and safe to introduce under a patient’s bandage and cut off.

Anotherpuzzle: how was the scent of the poem’s speaker’s seamstress aunt left on the metal scissors? What was the scent of that woman?

The poem took one person to her mother’s sewing basket, to the pinking shears (that have given way in this day and age to “fast fashion”—whatever that is some of us wondered—and to all the items her mother sewed, including skating costumes.

Another person told of his mother and father meeting because his mother and his father’s sisters having been seamstresses during the war. He, too, knew pinking shears.

As we discussed the double-ness of “a pair of scissors” a person, who spoke Portuguese noted that the equivalent “tesoura” is a singular noun as it is in Spanish (la tijeras), the language in which Neruda wrote.

Neruda concludes having decided to “cut short” his ode with “the scissors of good sense.

Our prompt was: “Write an ode to something common.”

The humor that we heard, just below the surface, in Neruda’s writing seemed to prompt playfulness in participants’ writing odes to toothbrushes, scavenged pens, the sun, and the flame of a candle.   

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, October 7th at 12pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions page.

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"Ode to a Pair of Scissors" by Pablo Neruda

Prodigious scissors
(looking like birds, or fish),
you are as polished as a knight’s
shining armor.
 
Two long and treacherous
knives
crossed and bound together
for all time,
two
tiny rivers
joined:
thus was born a creature for cutting,
a fish that swims among billowing linens,
a bird that flies
through
barbershops.
 
Scissors
that smell of
my seamstress
aunt’s
hands
when their vacant
metal eye
spied on
our
cramped childhood,
tattling
to the neighbors
about our thefts of plums and kisses.
There,
in the house,
nestled in their corner,
the scissors crossed
our lives,
and oh so
many lengths of
fabric
that they cut and kept on cutting:
for newlyweds and the dead,
for newborns and hospital wards.
They cut
and kept on cutting,
also the peasant’s
hair
as tough
as a plant that clings to rock,
and flags
soon
stained and scorched
by blood and flame,
and vine
stalks in winter,
and the cord
of
voices
on the telephone.
 
A long-lost pair of scissors
cut your mother’s
thread
from your navel
and handed you for all time
your separate existence.
Another pair, not necessarily
somber,
will one day cut
the suit you wear to your grave.
 
Scissors
have gone
everywhere,
they’ve explored
the world
snipping off pieces of
happiness
and sadness
indifferently.
Everything has been material
for scissors to shape:
the tailor’s
giant
scissors,
as lovely as schooners,
and very small ones
for trimming nails
in the shape
of the waning moon,
and the surgeon’s
slender
submarine scissors
that cut the complications
and the knot that should not have grown inside you. 
 
Now, I’ll cut this ode short
with the scissors
of good sense,
so that it won’t be too long or too short,
so that it
will
fit in your pocket
smoothed and folded
like
a pair
of scissors.
 
                                                                       
Pablo Neruda
Ode to Common Things 
New York: Bullfinch Press: 1994
Translator Ken Krabbenhoft