Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we read a poem “GOD” by Campbell McGrath, posted below.

Our prompt was: “The body prefers...”

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

GOD by Campbell McGrath

GOD
It makes sense notionally, a painless hypothesis
for our predicament, crayoned face to bridge
the gulf between grace and lightning storm.
But why should God be imagined as human—heavens,
dogs are nobler creatures, to say nothing of whales
or oak trees—and why as a man? Why should God
be gendered any more than potassium and gravity?
If a coconut falls on your head, you don't question its
sexuality. You curse, flail, you might even die,
poor donkey of the body tapping out, farewell.
Death doesn't scare the body because all the body wants
is to lie on the couch with a golf tournament on TV
but the mind is drip, drip, drip, drip, relentless.
It wants God to be more than a notion, it wants God
to be real so it can escape the hairy carcass
and rise—eternity seems always to be an ascension—
the mind wants to climb that ladder while the body 
prefers to bask in a confetti of chatter,
the mind wants to study the stars from the roof
and imagine an afterlife it understands 
deep down, in its python coils, to be nothing 
but a metaphor, a hunger for reassurance, a telescope
resolving the night into a zodiac of consolation.

Credit: Campbell McGrath
The New Yorker. June 30, 2025

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we read a poem “Try to Praise the Mutilated World” by Adam Zagajewski, posted below.

Our prompt was: “Write about a world you imagine.”

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 July 21st at 12pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions.

 Try to Praise the Mutilated World by Adam Zagajewski

Try to praise the mutilated world.
Remember June's long days,
and wild strawberries, drops of rosé wine.
The nettles that methodically overgrow
the abandoned homesteads of exiles.
You must praise the mutilated world.
You watched the stylish yachts and ships;
one of them had a long trip ahead of it,
while salty oblivion awaited others.
You've seen the refugees going nowhere,
you've heard the executioners sing joyfully.
You should praise the mutilated world.
Remember the moments when we were together
in a white room and the curtain fluttered.
Return in thought to the concert where music flared.
You gathered acorns in the park in autumn
and leaves eddied over the earth's scars.
Praise the mutilated world
and the gray feather a thrush lost,
and the gentle light that strays and vanishes
and returns.

Copyright Credit: Adam Zagajewski, "Try to Praise the Mutilated World" from Without End: New and Selected Poems. Copyright © 2002 by Adam Zagajewski. Used by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC,  http://us.macmillan.com/fsg. All rights reserved.

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we read a poem “An Optimism” by Cameron Awkward-Rich, posted below.

Our prompt was: “Write about a time a door opened.”

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

An Optimism by Cameron Awkward-Rich

It is morning. Remember that.
It is morning and the house is quiet,
so quiet that I can, for the moment, set myself
to wandering. I can sit patient at the door.
I can beg and bang to be let in. I am
turning this way and that. I am circling
the hole in the world of my imagination.
Let me in. I am saying the words, predictable
as any key—when I was a child,
when my mother, when the swarm of bees,
when I spent my days in mud among
the worms, rushing down the hill, our flooding
yard, when Hannah’s brother, her mother,
when I was too unclean, too wild a thing,
when I was barred from, when I sat alone
in the snow behind her house, pristine,
when, briefly, J and I were, when we
flew darkly down the green suburban
street, when he loved me, or something
in me and I loved the wind between us,
our bloody knees, when I think back, I am
nearly always otherwise alone, though
I never was alone, child of the salamanders,
child of the morning snow, the shamefaced
leaves. All my life, certainly for as long
as I’ve known I had a life, I was
like the sparrow right now outside
my window, flying headfirst, incessantly,
into what must seem, to her, like sky.
All around me people moved and laughed
and seemed, from where I fell,
to understand some silent thing,
some secret word that made itself
no home in me. Aggrieved, the world
of other people. I let it go.

Source: Poetry (June 2025)

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we took a close look at the painting “Woman in Blue” by Chaim Soutine, posted below.

Our prompt was: “Write about something untold.”

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 July 11th at 12pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions.

Woman in Blue by Chaim Soutine

Credit: Chaim Soutine. barnesfoundation.org

For this session we read a poem“Redeem” by Rosalie Moffett, posted below.

Our prompt was: “Write about a redemption center.”

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 July 30th at 6pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions.

Redeem by Rosalie Moffett
The sun was losing
a long gold tooth

on the linoleum
of the labor and delivery ward.

I lifted my plastic bracelet to the green eye
of the barcode gun and it sang

the first note
of money’s national anthem.

Redeem, a word with its feet
in the cement block

of bribe, of buy. Each Tylenol,
a tiny egg in the nest

of the nurse’s cupped hand,
rematerialized weeks later

on the itemized bill. Nearby, a sign
on the fine diamond storefront:

GOING OUT OF     SIN     !

Redemption, a mercy

of wind, of one idea
asleep in another.

I had been the nation
you lived in. Like a shore

in lapping water,
you made your borders

expand a little
with each breath.

Source: Poetry (April 2024)

For this session we took a close look at the paiting “The Rapture” by Sean Earley, posted below.

Our prompt was: “Write about being suspended.”

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 June 27th at 12pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions.

The Rapture by Sean Earley

Credit: John Earley. Dallas Museum of Art, gift of Paul Bridgewater

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we read excerpt from Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong, posted below.

Our prompt was: “Write about a memory of water.”

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 June 20th at 12pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions.

The hardest thing in the world is to live only once.

But it’s beautiful here, even the ghosts agree. Mornings, when the light rinses this place the shade of oatmeal, they rise as mist over the rye across the tracks and stumble toward the black-spired pines searching for their names, names that no longer live in any living thing’s mouth. Our town is raised up from a scab of land along a river in New England. When the prehistoric glaciers melted, the valley became a world-sized lake, and when that dried up it left a silvery trickle along the basin called the Connecticut: Algonquin for “long tidal river.” The sediment here is rich with every particle welcoming to life. As you approach, you’ll be flanked by wide stretches of thumb-sized buds shooting lucent through April mud. Within months these saplings will stand as packed rows of broadleaf tobacco and silver queen corn. Beyond the graveyard whose stones have lost their names to years, there’s a covered bridge laid over a dried-up brook whose memory of water never reached this century. Cross that and you’ll find us. Turn right at Conway’s Sugar Shack, gutted and shuttered, with windows blown out and the wooden sign that reads WE SWEETEN SOON AS THE CROCUS BLOOM, rubbed to braille by wind. In spring the cherry blossoms foam across the county from every patch of green unclaimed by farms or strip malls. They came to us from centuries of shit, dropped over this place by geese whenever summer beckons their hollow bones north.

excerpt from Emperor of Gladness, Ocean Vuong

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we read an excerpt from “Wandering Stars” by Tommy Orange, posted below.

Our prompt was: “Write about what is lost in the taking?”

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 9th at 6pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions.

Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange excerpt from pg. 83

Well he’s only got the one eye, but it’s got more life in it than I’ve seen in some men with two. And I’ve seen worse when they know what they want and they’re hungry for it, white men in this country, they come to take everything, even themselves, they have taken so much they have lost themselves in the taking, and what will be left of such a nation once they are done? My mother once said, “A nation is not conquered until the hearts of its women are on the ground. Then it is finished, no matter how brave its warriors, or how strong their weapons.” I wondered about the women’s hearts on the ground. And I wondered about American women. White women. Where were their hearts? I take solace in knowing my heart is still in my chest, that yours is in there too, beating like a drum waiting for its dancer, keeping me on my feet, ready for a rhythm, ready for what’s next, because what’s next is always coming.

Your father had a harder time at the school, because he was a boy but also because of his freckles, which he had on account of him being a half-breed, which meant he got it bad from both sides. No one wanted him because he didn’t seem like he belonged enough on either side.

Sometimes the look on his face got so bad it seemed to be saying he didn’t even belong to himself, did not even want to belong to himself.

Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange p. 83

Credit: Tommy Orange