Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we read an excerpt from the novel Exit West by Mohsin Hamid (pg. 139), posted below.

Our prompt was: “Write about what we are born of.”

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

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Excerpt (p 139) from Exit West by Mohsin Hamid (2017)

“The cherry trees exploded on Palace Gardens Terrace  at that time, bursting into white blossoms, the closest thing many of the street’s residents had ever seen to snow, and reminding others of ripe cotton in the fields, waiting to be picked, waiting for labor, for the efforts of dark bodies from the villages, and in these trees there were now dark bodies too, children who climbed and played among the boughs, like little monkeys, not because to be dark is to be monkey-like, though that has been and was being and will long be slurred, but because people are monkeys who have forgotten that they are monkeys, and so have lost respect for what they are born of, for the natural world around them, but not, just then, these children, who were thrilled in nature, playing imaginary games, lost in the clouds of white like balloonists or pilots or phoenixes or dragons, and as bloodshed loomed they made of these trees that were perhaps not intended to be climbed the stuff of a thousand fantasies.”