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.

---

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.