Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

Our text for this session was the poem Pink Hydrangea by Rainer Maria Rilke translated by Walter Arndt, paired with the painting “Pink Hydrangea” by Ephraim Rubenstein. Both posted below.

Our prompt was: “Write about a color-filled moment.”

More details on this session will be posted, 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 March 1st at 6pm EST, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions page.

Pink Hydrangea
by Rainer Maria Rilke
( translation: Walter Arndt )

Who thought such pink could be? Who knew it there
Accumulating in each blushing cluster?
Like gilded things which by and by unluster
They gently grow unred as if from wear.

That one should give such rosiness out free!
Does it stay theirs still, smiling where it went?
Are angels there to take it tenderly like a scent?

Or, it may be, they only let it go
That it might never learn of overblowing.
Beneath this pink there lurked a greenness, though,
Which listened and now fades away, all knowing.

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

Our text for this session was “The Mississippi River Empties Into the Gulf” by Lucille Clifton, posted below.

Our prompt was: “Write about standing on the edge.“

More details on this session will be posted, 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 February 24th at 12pm EST, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions page.

The Mississippi River Empties Into The Gulf 
and the gulf enters the sea and so forth,
 none of them emptying anything,
 all of them carrying yesterday
 forever on their white tipped backs,
 all of them dragging forward tomorrow.
 it is the great circulation
 of the earth's body, like the blood
 of the gods, this river in which the past
 is always flowing. every water
 is the same water coming round.
 everyday someone is standing on the edge
 of this river, staring into time,
 whispering mistakenly:
 only here. only now. 

-Lucille Clifton

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we watched a performance of “Over the Rainbow” by Eva Cassidy, posted below.

Our prompt was to begin your writing with the word: “Somewhere…“

More details on this session will be posted, 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 February 22nd at 6pm EST, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions page.

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

Our text was an excerpt from The Overstory by Richard Powers, posted below.

Our prompt was: Describe a time you traveled everywhere, just by holding still.

More details on this session will be posted, 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 February 15th at 6pm EST, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions page.

From The Overstory by Richard Powers

First there was nothing. Then there was everything.

Then, in a park above a western city after dusk, the air is raining messages.

A woman sits on the ground, leaning against a pine. Its bark pressed hard against her back, as hard as life. Its needles scent the air and a force hums in the heart of the wood. Her ears tune down to the lowest frequencies. The tree is saying things, in words before words.

It says: Sun and water are questions endlessly worth answering.

It says: A good answer must be reinvented many times, from scratch.

It says: Every piece of earth needs a new way to grip it. There are more ways to branch than any cedar pencil will ever find. A thing can travel everywhere, just by holding still.

The woman does exactly that. Signals rain down around her like seeds.

Talk runs far afield tonight. The bends in the alders speak of long-ago disasters. Spikes of pale chinquapin flowers shake down their pollen; soon they will turn into spiny fruits. Poplars repeat the wind’s gossip. Persimmons and walnuts set out their bribes and rowans their blood-red clusters. Ancient oaks wave prophecies of future weather. The several hundred kinds of hawthorn laugh at the single name they’re forced to share. Laurels insist that even death is nothing to lose sleep over.

Something in the air’s scent commands the woman: Close your eyes and think of willow. The weeping you see will be wrong. Picture an acacia thorn. Nothing in your thought will be sharp enough. What hovers right above you? What floats over your head right now – now?

Trees even farther away join in: All the ways you imagine us – bewitched mangroves up on stilts, a nutmeg’s inverted space, gnarled baja elephant trunks, the straight-up missile of a sal – are always amputations. Your kind never sees us whole. You miss the half of it, and more. There’s always as much belowground as above.

That’s the trouble with people, their root problem. Life runs alongside them, unseen. Right here, right next. Creating the soil. Cycling water. Trading in nutrients. Making weather. Building atmosphere. Feeding and curing and sheltering more kinds of creatures than people know how to count.

A chorus of living wood sings to the woman: If your mind were only a slightly greener thing, we’d drown you in meaning.

The pine she leans against says: Listen. There’s something you need to hear.

27 participants, at least 3 new, Zoomed in from snow country: IL, ME, MI, NJ, NY, PA, and Canada. We are not sure how it was in Ireland and the UK but know it was warmer in TX.

All gathered around the poem “Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden, a poem of waking on cold Sunday mornings. Many people in the group related to the “weather” of fathers who were silent or serious or absent. Much of our discussion centered around what the poetic speaker referred to as “What I did not know” (with its Shakespearean resonance) and the changed perspective/understanding of parents when children become adults, perhaps become parents themselves, and know “love’s austere ‘offices”: work, responsibility, and silent preoccupations. And perhaps know, too, the young’s lack of gratitude or misunderstanding of these sometimes lonely offices.

By reading the poem aloud we were able to hear the assonance as part of the narrative: the harshness of hard “c” and “k” and “ch” in cold, cracked, chronic and the softness of “s” in Sunday, dress, and shoes.

Attention was paid to the possessive pronoun “my” modifying “father” signaling that the poem’s speaker was writing of personal experiences in a house that not only creaked in the cold but also was heated with “chronic angers.” 

In the poem we heard the swerve from fear in childhood to sorrow and regret for the speaker’s own silence or indifferent tone as he did not hear the love expressed, if not in words, in actions.

The suggested prompt was “Begin writing with the words: What I did not know…” 

Three people read their 4-minute writing. One told of meeting his father’s friend, at the funeral home, and how the man remembered the father as funny and fun–playing jokes on fellow workers–a father far different than the man’s son remembered. Two people wrote of changes in body and health, interests and attitude, which allowed then to see and act differently in middle age. All three readings incorporated the writers’ changed viewpoints from past to present.    

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 February 10th at 12pm EST, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions page.

 Those Winter Sundays 
 By Robert Hayden
 
 Sundays too my father got up early
 and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
 then with cracked hands that ached
 from labor in the weekday weather made
 banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
 
 I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
 When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
 and slowly I would rise and dress,
 fearing the chronic angers of that house,
 
 Speaking indifferently to him,
 who had driven out the cold
 and polished my good shoes as well.
 What did I know, what did I know
 of love’s austere and lonely offices? 

Robert Hayden, “Those Winter Sundays” 
from Collected Poems of Robert Hayden, 
edited by Frederick Glaysher. 
Copyright ©1966 by Robert Hayden.