Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we read a poem “The Lilies” by Karenne Wood, posted below. 

Our prompt was: “Growing in the darkness.”

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 December 5th at 6pm EST, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions.

"The Lilies" by Karenne Wood

When I learned I might have cancer,
I bought fifteen white lilies. Easter was gone:
the trumpets were wilted, plants crooked with roots
bound in pots. I dug them into the garden,
knowing they would not bloom for another year.
All summer, the stalks stood like ramshackle posts
while I waited for results. By autumn, the stalks
had flopped down. More biopsies, laser incisions,
the cancer in my tongue a sprawling mass. Outside,
the earth remained bare, rhizomes shrunken
below the frost line. Spring shoots appeared
in bright green skins, and lilies bloomed
in July, their waxed trumpets pure white,
dusting gold pollen to the ground.
                                                                     This year,
tripled in number, they are popping up again. I wait,
a ceremony, for the lilies to open, for the serpentine length
of the garden to bloom in the shape of my tongue’s scar,
a white path with one end leading into brilliant air,
the other down the throat’s canyon, black
and unforgiving. I try to imagine
what could grow in such darkness. I am waiting
for the lilies to open.

Credit: © 2001 by Karenne Wood

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we took a close look at the image “Desert Spirits” by Spencer Tunick, posted below. 

Our prompt was: “Write about being part of a group.”

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 November 30th at 12pm EST, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions.

“Desert Spirits” by Spencer Tunick

Credit: Spencer Tunick/Naked Pavement Inc

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we read a poem “Remember” by Joy Harjo, posted below. 

Our prompt was: “Write about what you remember.”

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

"Remember" by Joy Harjo

Remember the sky that you were born under,
know each of the star's stories.
Remember the moon, know who she is.
Remember the sun's birth at dawn, that is the
strongest point of time. Remember sundown
and the giving away to night.
Remember your birth, how your mother struggled
to give you form and breath. You are evidence of
her life, and her mother's, and hers.
Remember your father. He is your life, also.
Remember the earth whose skin you are:
red earth, black earth, yellow earth, white earth
brown earth, we are earth.
Remember the plants, trees, animal life who all have their
tribes, their families, their histories, too. Talk to them,
listen to them. They are alive poems.
Remember the wind. Remember her voice. She knows the
origin of this universe.
Remember you are all people and all people
are you.
Remember you are this universe and this
universe is you.
Remember all is in motion, is growing, is you.
Remember language comes from this.
Remember the dance language is, that life is.
Remember.

Copyright ©1983 by Joy Harjo 
from She Had Some Horses by Joy Harjo. 
Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we read a poem “Heart On Fire” by Ada Limón, posted below. 

Our prompt was: “Write about getting in trouble.”

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

Heart On Fire” by Ada Limón

As a foster child, my grandfather learned not
to get in trouble. Mexican and motherless—dead
as she was from tuberculosis—he practiced words
in a new language and kept his slender head down.
When the other boys begged him to slip into
the music shop’s upper window to steal harmonicas
for each of them, music being important, thievery
being secondary, he refused. When the cops came
to spot the boys who robbed the music store, they 
could easily find the ones spitting broken
notes into the air, joyously mouthing the stainless 
steel, mimicking men on street corners busking 
for coins. But not my grandfather, he knew not
to risk it all for a stolen moment of exaltation.
It’s easy to imagine  this is who I come from, a line
of serious men who follow the rules, but might I add
that later he was a dancer, a singer, an actor whose best roles
ended up on the cutting room floor. A cutup, a ham
who liked a good story. Who would have told you
life was a series of warnings, but also magic. Once,
he was sent for a box of matches and he put that box
of strike-anywheres in the pocket of his madras shirt
and ran home, he ran so fast to be on time, to be good,
and when he did so, the whole box ignited, so he was
a boy running down the canyon road with what
looked like a heart on fire. He’d laugh when he told 
you this, a heart on fire, he’d say, so you’d remember.

Limón, Ada. The Hurting Kind. (2022) “Heart On Fire” p.62. Minneapolis: Milkweed Edition.

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we read a poem “At Blackwater Pond” by Mary Oliver, posted below. 

Our prompt was: “The beautiful thing that just happened 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 November 14th at 6pm EST, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions.

At Blackwater Pond ” by Mary Oliver

At Blackwater Pond the tossed waters have
settled
after a night of rain. 
I dip my cupped hands. I drink
a long time. It tastes
like stone, leaves, fire. It falls cold
into my body, waking the bones. I hear them
deep inside me, whispering
oh what is that beautiful thing
that just happened?

Copyright © 2006 - 2010 Famous Poets And Poems . 

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we read an excerpt from “This Here Flesh” by Cole Arthur Riley, posted below. 

Our prompt was: Start with “I will not apologize...”

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 November 7th at 6pm EST, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions.

"This Here Flesh" by Cole Arthur Riley

"Rest is an act of defiance, and it cannot be predicated on apol-
ogy. It's the audacity to face the demands of this world and
proclaim, We will not be owned.
     We will not return to the chains that once held us. They are
brittle and tarnished from our tears, which made the flood.
Remember. You were never meant to prove your dignity. You,
whose flesh contains more bodies than your own. You don't
belong in the catacombs of restlessness, wandering from death
to death. Lie down with me in the pasture, where life is alive
and growing with the unapologetic slowness of a blade of
grass. What will become of us?
     We will be free and we will be dreaming."

Credit: This Here Flesh by Cole Arthur Riley (page 157)