Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we read an excerpt from This is Happiness by Niall Williams, posted below. 

Our prompt was: “What are you chewing on these days?”

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

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 Friday March 4th at 12pm EST,  with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions page.

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from This is Happiness by Niall Williams

I couldn’t meet his eyes. I took a bite of the bread.

    The thing about Doady’s brownbread is when you take a

bite of it you’ve taken a bite out of the elements, earth, air,

fire and water all, and while your mouth negotiates with the

grainy dryness now made a ball by the moisture of the butter,

while you realise that by an alchemy of bakery the lump of

the bread in your mouth is bigger than it seemed in your

hand, keep chewing, and that there’s nothing you can do now

because you’re getting a first-hand practical demonstration of

what Duns Scotus called Thisness, keep chewing, the dense

solid mass of the undeniable, you can say nothing for a bit.

You can wave at a couple of drowsy bees warmed awake and

delirious on the early coconut of the furze blooms. You can

make a low throat sound to signal you’ll say something shortly,

but while you’re eating Doady’s brownbread, keep chewing,

you’re gagged by the essential stuff of substance, that insists

on its own primacy, that, like life itself, is partways laughing

at you and partways saying Take me seriously, because other-

wise it may just choke you. So, I said nothing for a bit.

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we read an excerpt from The Once and Future King by T.H. White, posted below. 

Our prompt was: “Write a magic spell.”

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

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

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from The Once and Future King by T.H. White

“The best thing for being sad,” replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, “is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honor trampled in the sewer of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then–to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the thing for you. Look at what a lot of things there are to learn – pure science, the only purity there is. You can learn astronomy in a lifetime, natural history in three, literature in six. And then, after you have exhausted a milliard lifetimes in biology and medicine and the criticism and geography and history and economics – why, you can start to make a cartwheel out of the appropriate wood, or spend fifty years learning to begin to learn to beat your adversary at fencing. After that you can start again on mathematics, until it is time to learn to plough.” 
“Apart from all these things,” said the Wart, “what do you suggest for me just now?”
“Let me see,” said the magician, considering. “We have had a short six years of this, and in that time I think I am right in saying that you have been many kinds of animal, vegetable, mineral, etc.–many things in earth, air, fire, and water“I don’t know much,” said the Wart, “about the animals and earth.”
“Then you had better meet my friend the badger.”
“I have never met a badger.”
“Good,” said Merlin. “Except for Archimedes, he is the most learned creature I know. You will like him.”
“By the way,” added the magician, stopping in the middle of his spell, “there is one thing I ought to tell you. This is the last time I shall be able to turn you into anything. All the magic for that sort of thing has been used up, and this is the end of your education. When Kay has been knighted my labours will be over. You will have to go away then, to be his squire in the wide world, and I shall go elsewhere. Do you think you have learned anything?” 
“I have learned, and been happy.”
“That’s right, then,” said Merlin. “Try to remember what you learned.”

(pp. 183-184) New York: The Berkeley Publishing Co. 1958 [originally published 1939]

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we read the poem “Spring and Fall” by Gerard Manley Hopkins, posted below. 

Our prompt was: “Write about something you would say to your younger self.”

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

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

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“Spring and Fall” by Gerard Manley Hopkins

                     to a young child

Márgarét, áre you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.


Source: Gerard Manley Hopkins: Poems and Prose (Penguin Classics, 1985)

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we read “The Three Sisters,” an excerpt from Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Hall Kimmerer, posted below. 

Our prompt was: “Write about telling a story by what you do.”

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

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 Friday February 18th at 12pm EST,  with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions page.

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“The Three Sisters,” an excerpt from Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Hall Kimmerer

It should be them that tell this story. Corn leaves rustle with a signature sound, a papery conversation with each other and the breeze. On a hot day in July – when the corn can grow six inches in a single day – there is a squeak of internodes expanding, stretching the stem towards the light. Leaves escape their sheaths with a drawn-out creak and sometimes, when all is still, you can hear the sudden pop of ruptured pith when water-filled cells become too large and turgid for the confines of the stem. These are sounds of being, but they are not the voice.

The beans must make a caressing sound, a tiny hiss as a soft-haired leader twines around the scabrous stem of corn. Surfaces vibrate delicately against each other, tendrils pulse as they cinch around a stem, something only a nearby flea beetle could hear. But this is not the song of beans.

I’ve lain among the ripening pumpkins and heard creaking as the parasol leaves rock back and forth, tethered by the tendrils, wind lifting their edges and easing them down again. A microphone in the hollow of a swelling pumpkin would reveal the pop of seeds expanding and the rush of water filling succulent orange flesh. These are sounds, but not the story. Plants tell their stories not by what they say, but by what they do.

Thank you to everyone who joined us this Valentine’s Day for our evening session!

For this session we watched the performance of Seasons of Love from the film Rent, posted below. 

Our prompt was: “How do we measure a year?”

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

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 16th at 12pm EST,  with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions page.

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Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session our text was the poem The giver (for Berdis) by James Baldwin, posted below. 

Our prompt was: “The hope of giving is…”

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

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 14th at 6pm EST,  with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions page.

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The giver (for Berdis) by James Baldwin


If the hope of giving
is to love the living,
the giver risks madness
in the act of giving.

Some such lesson I seemed to see
in the faces that surrounded me.

Needy and blind, unhopeful, unlifted,
what gift would give them the gift to be gifted?
          The giver is no less adrift
          than those who are clamouring for the gift.

If they cannot claim it, if it is not there,
if their empty fingers beat the empty air
and the giver goes down on his knees in prayer
knows that all of his giving has been for naught
and that nothing was ever what he thought
and turns in his guilty bed to stare
at the starving multitudes standing there
and rises from bed to curse at heaven,
he must yet understand that to whom much is given
much will be taken, and justly so:
I cannot tell how much I owe.



James Baldwin, "The giver (for Berdis)" from Jimmy’s Blues. 
Copyright © 2014 by The James Baldwin Estate. 

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session our text was the poem Early Confession by Carolyn Forché, posted below. 

Our prompt was: “If I had never…”

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

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 Friday February 11th at 12pm EST,  with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions page.

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Early Confession by Carolyn Forché
 
If I had never walked the snow fields, heard the iced birch,
leant against wind hard toward distant house, ever distant,
wind in the coat, snow over the boot tops, supper fires
in windows far across the stubbly farms, none of them
my house until the end, the last, and late, always late, despite how early
I’d set off wearing gloves of glass, a coat standing up by itself.
If I had never reached the house, but instead lain down in the drifts
to finish a dream, if I had finished, would I have 
reached the rest of my life, here, now, with you whispering: 
must not sleep, not rest, must not take flight, must wake.