Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we read an excerpt (p 9-10) from Island at the Center of the World by Russell Shorto, posted below.

Our prompt was: “what happens when time slows down.”

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 July 1st at 12pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions.

“Island at the Center of the World” by Russell Shorto (p 9-10)

All that said, what originally captivated me about the Dutch documents — that they offered a way to reimagine New York City as a wilderness—stayed alive throughout my research. More than anything, then, this book invites you to do the impossible: to strip from your mental image of Manhattan Island all associations of power, concrete, and glass; to put time into full reverse, unfill the massive landfills, and undo the extensive leveling programs that flattened the hills and filled the gullies. To witness the return of waterfalls, to watch freshwater ponds form in place of asphalt intersections; to let buildings vanish and watch stands of pin oak, sweetgum, basswood, and hawthorne take their place. To imagine the return of salt marshes, mudflats, grasslands, of leopard frogs, grebes, cormorants, and bitterns; to discover newly pure estuaries encrusting themselves with scallops, lamp mussels, oysters, quahogs, and clams. To see maple-ringed meadows become numbered with deer and the higher elevations ruled by wolves. 

And then to stop the time machine, let it hover a moment on the south-most tip of an island poised between the Atlantic Ocean and the civilization of Europe on one side and a virgin continent on the other; to let that moment swell, hearing the screech of gulls and the slap of waves and imagining these same sounds, waves and birds, waves and birds, with regular interruptions by wracking storms, unchanged for dozens of centuries.

And then let time start forward once again as something comes into view on the horizon. Sails.

Credit: Russell Shorto

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we read a poem “Final Poem for My Father Misnamed in My Mouth” by Phillip B. Williams, posted below.

Our prompt was: “Write about Fatherlight.”

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 June 15th at 6pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions.

Final Poem for My Father Misnamed in My Mouth by Phillip B. Williams

Sunlight still holds you and gives

your shapelessness to every room.

By noon, the kitchen catches your hands,

misshapen sunrays. The windows

have your eyes. Taken from me,

your body. I reorder my life with

absence. You are everywhere now

where once I could not find you

even in your own body. Death means

everything has become

possible. I’ve been told I have

your ways, your laughter haunts my mother

from my throat. Everything

is possible. Fatherlight

washes over the kitchen floor.

I try to hold a bit of kindness

for the dead and make of memory

a sponge to wash your corpse.

Your name is not addict or sir.

This is not a dream: you died

and were buried three times. Once,

after my birth. Again, against

your hellos shedding into closing doors,

your face a mask I placed over my face.

The final time, you beneath my feet. Was I

buried with you then? I will not call

what you had left anything

other than gone and sweet perhaps. I am

not your junior, but I fell in love

with being your son. Now what? Possibility

was a bird I once knew. It had one wing.

Credit: Phillip B. Williams