Thank you to everyone who joined for this session!

Our text for this session was an excerpt from “Invisible Cities” by Italo Calvino, posted below.

Our prompt for this session was: “Write about a fascinating absence.”

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Please join us for our next session Wednesday June 9th at 12pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions page.

After a seven days’ march through woodland, the traveler directed toward Baucis cannot see the city and yet he has arrived. The slender stilts that rise from the ground at a great distance from one another and are lost above the clouds support the city. You climb them with ladders. On the ground the inhabitants rarely show themselves: having already everything they need up there, they prefer not to come down. Nothing of the city touches the earth except those long flamingo legs on which it rests and, when the days are sunny, a pierced, angular shadow that falls on the foliage.

         These are three hypotheses about the inhabitants of Baucis: that they hate the earth; that they respect the earth so much that they avoid all contact; that they love it as it was before they existed and with spyglasses and telescopes aimed downward they never tire of examining it, leaf by leaf, stone by stone, ant by ant, contemplating with fascination their own absence.

Cities and Eyes (Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, pg. 77)