Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we read a short story “The Visitor” by Lydia Davis, posted below.

Our prompt was: “Write about an unspoken social contract.”

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 March 11th at 6pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions.

The Visitor by Lydia Davis

Sometime in the early summer, a stranger will come and take up residence in our house.  Although we have not met him, we know he will be bald, incontinent, speechless, and nearly completely unable to help himself.  We don’t know exactly how long he will stay, relying entirely on us for food, clothing, and shelter.
Our situation reminds me that a leathery-skinned old Indian gentleman once spent several months with my sister in London.  At first he slept in a tent in her back yard. Then he moved into the house.  Here he made it his project to rearrange the many books in the house, which were in no particular order.  He decided upon categories—mystery, history, fiction—and surrounded himself with clouds of smoke from his cigarettes as he worked.  He explained his system in correct but halting English to anyone who came into the room.  Several years later he died suddenly and painfully in a London hospital.  For religious reasons, he had refused all treatment.

This Indian visitor of my sister’s also reminds me of another old man—the very old father of a friend of mine.  He had once been a professor of economics.  He was old and deaf even when my friend was a child.  Later he could not contain his urine, laughed wildly and soundlessly during his daughter’s wedding, and when asked to say a few words rose trembling and spoke about Communism.  This man is now in a nursing home.  My friend says he is smaller every year.

Like my friend’s father, our visitor will have to be bathed by us, and will not use the toilet.  We have appointed a small, sunny room for him next to ours, where we will be able to hear him if he needs help during the night.  Some day, he may repay us for all the trouble we will go to, but we don’t really expect it.  Although we have not yet met him, he is one of the few people in the world for whom we would willingly sacrifice almost anything.

Credit: Lydia Davis Collection of stories Can’t and Won’t (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2014). 

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we took a close look at “I thought the streets were paved with gold, 1991″ by Pacita Abad, posted below.

Our prompt was: “Write about an imaginary place of abundant riches.”

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 8th at 12pm EST, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions.

I thought the streets were paved with gold, 1991 by Pacita Abad

Credit: Pacita Abad

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we read an excerpt from the memoir “Stay True” by Hua Hsu, posted below.

Our prompt was: “When the needle skipped…”

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

An excerpt from the memoir "Stay True" by Hua Hsu.

You make a world out of the things you buy. Everything you 
pick up is a potential gateway, a tiny, cosmetic change that 
might blossom into an entirely new you. A bold shirt around 
which you base a new personality, an angular coffee table that 
might reboot your whole environment, that one enormous 
novel that all the fashionable English majors carry around. You 
buy things to communicate affiliation to a small tribe, hopeful 
you’ll encounter the only other person in line buying the same 
obscure things as you. Maybe I, too, will become the kind of 
person who has books like Infinite Jest casually strewn on his 
cool, angular coffee table. Maybe I’ll become the kind of per-
son who seems as if he should have that book but choose not 
to. I spent hours at Amoeba Music, walking back and forth in 
the same few sections (“Rock,” “Indie”). There was an entire 
other wing devoted to jazz and something called world music; 
I looked forward to one day becoming the type of person who 
understood these genres and, by extension the world. One day, 
I bought a jungle 12-inch based purely on a description I’d read 
in a magazine. At first, I thought the record was defective, since 
it was nothing but jittery drums and a bass line that kept mak-
ing the needle skip, Where was the rest of the song? But then I 
realized it was supposed to sound this way, that this bass line was 
a portal to somewhere new, and I couldn’t wait to hear more. I 
started picking up rave flyers at coffee shops and record stores. 
It was electrifying to think about how much more music there 
was in the world left to hear.

Credit: Hua Hsu

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we read “We Are All in the Dumps with Jack and Guy: Two Nursery Rhymes with Pictures” by Maurice Sendak, posted below.

Our prompt was: “ Write about a home without walls.”

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 26th at 6pm EST, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions.

“We Are All in the Dumps with Jack and Guy: Two Nursery Rhymes with Pictures” by Maurice Sendak

Credit: Maurice Sendak

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we read a poem “By the Boulder Cluster the Wind” by A. R. Ammons, posted below.

Our prompt was: “I am shaped by…”

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 23rd at 12pm EST, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions.

By the Boulder Cluster the Wind by A. R. Ammons

By the boulder cluster the wind
struck up a dust-ghost,
A brothering shade and shadow,
And oh I said
that I could live lively as you
and have
no more to die

and the ghost tore
into a shackling shrub
and failed like sleet,
returning
shape’s interference
to clearing


The dust rearranging
to a new breeze
I gave up
the intermediate
paradise
and said so
all things do misty arisings
mistily depart,
shingling down
the rills and ruffles
of nothing-in-between.

Ammons, A. R. “By the Boulder Cluster the Wind.” 
The Hudson Review, vol. 30, no. 3, 1977, pp. 371–371. 

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we read a book chapter titled “I’m Losing My Patients ” by Hilton Koppe from One Curious Doctor, posted below.

Our prompt was: “Write about the gift of knowing we are mortal.”

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 12th at 6pm EST, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions.

I’m Losing My Patients by Hilton Koppe from One Curious Doctor

The blank death certificate sits in front of me.  No matter where a life starts, where it ventures, 
the Medical Certificate of Death is the concluding punctuation mark on a person’s medical 
narrative. 
     I approach the completion of the death certificate with reverence.  My final task in the care of 
a patient.  A moment to pause. Reflect. Say goodbye.  To honour their life within the rigid confines 
of a bureaucratic document.  
     This ritual is becoming increasingly frequent.
     My patients have been growing older with me.  Despite medicine’s advances and my best 
efforts, they are dying.  It is their time.  I’m losing my patients.
     Just last month, I lost three.  Lilly, my oldest patient, was an elegant matriarch.  Each of her 
frequent visits ended with her gently touching my arm and saying, “Bless you, Hilton”.  I had cared 
for her husband Don before his death.  Now it was Lilly’s turn.  Her heart was failing. “I hope that
one night I will go to sleep and wake up dead.  Just like Don did.”  Her wish came true a few days 
ago.  Who’s going to bless me now?
     Len had been a child throughout Germany’s bombing of London.  I had once ruined his 
Christmas by sending him to hospital to have a heart pacemaker inserted.  He would have died 
without it.  He wasn’t ready for that.  The pacemaker kept him going for another decade.  Not 
always easy years.  But “better than the alternative”, as he often said.  Len was a poet.  Each visit 
to me was accompanied by the gift of a poem, “From when the muse was upon me”.  The last 
time I saw him he told me he was feeling better than he had for years.  Another gift.  He woke up 
dead the following week. 
     Joe had been a postman during the times when delivering the mail included many a garden 
path conversation.  Even as his dementia progressed, Joe still enjoyed animated conversations.  I 
loved how his disconnection with the present transported us to a simpler time.  Until that gift too 
was snuffed out by dementia’s relentless march.
     I finish writing the death certificate.  I pause and offer gratitude for the blessings, the poems, 
the conversations and all the other gifts my patients have shared with me, and I walk out to greet 
my next patient.  The waiting room is full.  Many familiar faces look my way.
     I am troubled by a nagging thought, a persistent pestering question.  Who will be next? 


Credit: Hilton Koppe

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we read a poem “I See My Bones In No Other ” by Liz Quirke from The Road, Slowly, posted below.

Our prompt was: “Write about your people.”

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 9th at 12pm EST, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions.

I See My Bones In No Other by Liz Quirke from The Road, Slowly

Credit: Liz Quirke

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we read a poem “Destruction” by Joanne Kyger from A Book of Luminous Things, Czeslaw Milosz, Editor, posted below.

Our prompt was: “Write about going through it.”

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

"Destruction" by Joanne Kyger from A Book of Luminous Things, Czeslaw Milosz, Editor

First of all do you remember the way a bear goes through 
a cabin when nobody is home? He goes through 
the front door. I mean he really goes through it. Then 
he takes the cupboard off the wall and eats a can of lard.

He eats all the apples, limes, dates, bottled decaffeinated 
coffee, and 35 pounds of granola. The asparagus soup cans 
fall to the floor. Yum! He chomps up Norwegian crackers 
stashed for the winter. And the bouillon, salt, pepper, 
paprika, garlic, onions, potatoes.

		                   He rips the Green Tara
poster from the wall. Tries the Coleman Mustard. Spills 
the ink, tracks in the flour. Goes up stairs and takes 
a shit. Rips open the water bed, eats the incense and 
drinks the perfume. Knocks over the Japanese tansu 
and the Persian miniature of a man on horseback watching 
a woman bathing.

	               Knocks Shelter, Whole Earth Catalouge, 
Planet Drum, Northern Mists, Truck Tracks, and 
Women’s Sports into the oozing water bed mess.
			                      He goes
down stairs and out the back wall. He keeps on going 
for a long way and finds a good cave to sleep it all off.
Luckily he ate the whole medicine cabinet, including stash 
of LSD, Peyote, Psilocybin, Amanita, Benzedrine, Valium 
and aspirin. 

Credit: Milosz, Czeslaw, ed. A Book of Luminous Things (1997). Harcourt, Brace & Company.

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we read a poem “The Earth” by Sheila Black, posted below.

Our prompt was: “Write about a moment of unexpected connection.”

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 2nd at 12pm EST, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions.

"The Earth" by Sheila Black

What can I tell her over breakfast when she says
her son suffers from madness, and because there
is no mental health, he has ended up in jail,
and she is relieved, because at least he might
be safe there or he might get to see the doctor.
We are eating egg-white omelets; we are counting
carbs. We are buttoning ourselves in our clean dresses
and high-heeled shoes in order to bring home the bacon,
doing what we need to do and “It is what it is.”
Her granddaughter and daughter are living with her
in the one bedroom. Nights, the daughter lounges by
the pool, looking at her phone, while she teaches the child
to plant seeds in a flower bed she feels bad she does not own.
She tells she cried in the car coming here; she did not know
me then. She thought we would be talking to each other
the whole time about what we are selling, what
the other might buy, but somehow we left that behind
over the toast with the tiny pots of strawberry jam.
Who can explain all this luxury, all this despair?
Or how we all hold our secret shames so close
and gloss our lips with “Cinnamon Fire” as if that were
some legitimate form of protection. Cinnamon Fire!
She just turned fifty. I tell her wait ten years—you
won’t know more, but you will get closer to forgiving,
because it is all happening on a wheel that spins
so fast. Why not stop to look at the pink flowers
you’ve planted with your granddaughter? Why not feel
your bare toes in the good wet earth? We play with the crusts
on our plates. The waitress takes the coffee away. We
are strangers again, each carrying our lonely fear
our children won’t find their way, wishing for them
some inner logic—sacred trust of earth and self, that exists
for each of us so far within, so far under the skin, we
can’t even begin to say what it is made of; it merely is,
poised between love and grief: the blue space we call wonder,
which is merely the dew on the grass, the shadow the sun
makes as it rolls over the vast skin of the Earth.

Copyright © 2023 by Sheila Black. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 28, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets.