Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we read a poem “Siren Song” by Margaret Atwood, posted below.

Our prompt was: “Write about a song nobody knows.”

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 28th at 12pm EST, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions.

Siren Song by Margaret Atwood

This is the one song everyone
would like to learn: the song
that is irresistible:

the song that forces men
to leap overboard in squadrons
even though they see the beached skulls

the song nobody knows
because anyone who has heard it
is dead, and the others can't remember.

Shall I tell you the secret
and if I do, will you get me
out of this bird suit?

I don't enjoy it here
squatting on this island
looking picturesque and mythical

with these two feathery maniacs,
I don't enjoy singing
this trio, fatal and valuable.

I will tell the secret to you,
to you, only to you.
Come closer. This song

is a cry for help: Help me!
Only you, only you can,
you are unique

at last. Alas
it is a boring song
but it works every time.

Copyright Credit: Margaret Atwood, “Siren Song” from Selected Poems 1965-1975. Copyright © 1974, 1976 by Margaret Atwood. Reprinted with the permission of the author and Houghton Mifflin Company.
Source: Poetry (February 1974)

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we read an excerpt from the novel “Orbital ” by Samantha Harvey, posted below.

Our prompt was: “Write about sending signals.”

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

Orbital by Samantha Harvey

When they hear on a phonograph a recording of rapid firecracker drills and bursts, will they know that these sounds denote brainwaves? Will they ever infer that over forty thousand years before in a solar system unknown a woman was rigged to an EEG and her thoughts recorded? Could they know to work backwards from the abstract sounds and translate them once more into brainwaves, and could they know from these brainwaves the kinds of thoughts the woman was having? Could they see into a human’s mind? Could they tell from this dip and rise in the EEG’s pattern that she was thinking simultaneously of earth and lover as if the two were continuous? Could they see that, though she tried to keep to her mental script, to bring to mind Lincoln and the Ice Age and the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt and whatever grand things had shaped the earth and which she wished to convey to an alien audience, every thought cascaded into the dark brows and proud nose of her lover, the wonderful articulation of his hands and the way he listened like a bird and how they had touched so often without touching. And then a spike in sound as she thought of that great city of Alexandria and of nuclear disarmament and the symphony of the earth’s tides and the squareness of his jaw and the way he spoke with such bright precision so that everything he said was epiphany and discovery and the way he looked at her as though she were the epiphany he kept on having and the thud of her heart and the flooding of heat about her body when she considered what it was he wanted to do to her and the migration of bison across a Utah plane and a geisha’s expressionless face and the knowledge of having found that thing in the world which she ought never to have had the good fortune of finding, of two minds and bodies flung at each other at full dumbfounding force so that her life had skittered sidelong and all her pin-boned plans just gone like that and her self engulfed in fire of longing and thoughts of sex and destiny, the completeness of love, their astounding earth, his hands, his throat, his bare back.

Credit: Harvey, Samantha. Orbital (2023). New York: Grove Press. p.132-34.

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we read a poem “The Snow Mare” by N. Scott Momaday, posted below.

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

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 10th at 6pm EST, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions.

The Snow Mare by N. Scott Momaday

In my dream, a blue mare loping,
Pewter on a porcelain field, away.
There are bursts of soft commotion
Where her hooves drive in the drifts,
And as dusk ebbs on the plane of night,
She shears the web of winter,
And on the far, blind side
She is no more. I behold nothing,
Wherein the mare dissolves in memory,
Beyond the burden of being.

Credit: N. Scott Momaday
Source: Poets.org

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we took a close look at the 1947 painting “Les Clochards, Montmartre, Paris” by Loïs Mailou Jones, posted below.

Our prompt was: “Write about going our separate ways.”

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 7th at 12pm EST, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions.

Les Clochards, Montmartre, Paris by Loïs Mailou Jones

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we read a poem “Breaking [News]” by Noor Hindi, posted below.

Our prompt was: “What buoys me through the world...”

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 January 31st at 12pm EST, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions.

Breaking [News] by Noor Hindi

We’ll wake up, Sunday morning, and read the paper. Read each other. Become

consumers

of each other’s stories, a desperate reaching

for another body’s warmth—its words buoying us through a world. We carry

graveyards on our backs and I’m holding a lightning bug

hostage in one hand, its light dimming in the warmth

of  my fist, and in the other, a pen, to document its death. Isn’t that terrible?

I’ll ask you, shutting my fist once more.

In interviews, I frame my subject’s stories through a lens to make them digestible

to consumers.

I  become a machine. A transfer of information. They  become a plea for empathy,

an oversaturation of feelings we’ll fail at transforming into action.

What’s lost is incalculable.

           And at the end of  summer, the swimming pools will be gutted of  water.

          And it’ll be impossible to swim.

Source: Poetry (December 2020)

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we read a poem “Another Antipastoral” by Vievee Francis, posted below.

Our prompt was: Begin with “My curious tale...”

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 January 24th at 12pm EST, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions.

Another Antipastoral by Vievee Francis

I want to put down what the mountain has awakened.


My mouthful of grass.
My curious tale. I want to stand still but find myself moved patch by patch.
There's a bleat in my throat. Words fail me here. Can you understand? I sink 
   to
my knees tired or not. I now know the ragweed from the goldenrod, and the
   blinding
beauty of green. Don't you see? I am shedding my skins. I am a paper hive, a 
   wolf spider,
the creeping ivy, the ache of a birch, a heifer, a doe. I have fallen from my 
   dream
of progress: the clear-cut glass, the potted and balconied tree, the lemon-
   waxed
wood over a marbled pillar, into my own nocturne. The lullabies I had 
   forgotten.
How could I know what slept inside? What would rend my fantasies to cud 
   and up
from this belly's wet straw-strewn field—

                                                                                these soundings.

Copyright Credit: Vievee Francis, "Another Antipastoral" from Forest Primeval.  
Source: Forest Primeval (TriQuarterly Books, 2016)

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we read a poem “Some Things I Like” from Listener by Lemn Sissay, posted below.

Our prompt was: “I like...”

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 January 17th at 12pm EST, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions.

Some Things I Like from Listener by Lemn Sissay

I like wrecks, I like ex-junkies,
I like flunks and ex-flunkies,
I like the way the career-less career,
I like flat beer,
I like people who tell half stories and forget the rest,
I like people who make doodles in important written tests,
I like being late. I like fate. I like the way teeth grate,
I like laceless shoes cordless blues,
I like the one-bar blues,
I like buttonless coats and leaky boats,
I like rubbish tips and bitten lips,
I like yesterday’s toast,
I like cold tea, I like reality,
I like ashtrays, I write and like crap plays.

I like curtains that don’t quite shut,
I like bread knives that don’t quite cut,
I like rips in blue jeans,
I like people who can’t say what they mean,
I like spiders with no legs, pencils with no lead,
Ants with no heads, worms that are half dead.
I like holes, I like coffee cold. I like creases in neat folds.
I like signs that just don’t know where they’re going,
I like angry poems,
I like the way you can’t pin down the sea.
See.

Credit: from Listener by Lemn Sissay.

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we read an excerpt from the novel “The Tidewater Tales” by John Barth, posted below.

Our prompt was: “Write about the story you would like someone in your life to tell.”

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 January 10th at 12pm EST, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions.

An excerpt from the novel The Tidewater Tales by John Barth.

KATHERINE SHERRITT SAGAMORE, 39 YEARS OLD,
AND 8 ½ MONTHS PREGNANT, 
BECALMED IN OUR ENGINELESS SMALL SAILBOAT, 
AT THE END OF A STICKY JUNE CHESAPEAKE AFTERNOON
AMID EVERY SIGN OF THUNDERSTORMS APPROACHING
FROM ACROSS THE BAY, 
AND SPEAKING AS SHE SOMETIMES DOES IN VERSE, 
SETS HER HUSBAND A TASK.

Tell me a story of women and men, 
Like us: like us in love for ten
Years, lovers for seven, spouses
Two, or two point five. Their Houses
Increase is the tale I’d wish you tell.

Why did that perfectly happy pair
Like us, decide this late to bear
A child? Why toil so to conceive
One (or more), when they both believe
The world’s aboard a handbasket bound for hell?
Well?

Credit: John Barth

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we read an excerpt from “Held ” by Anne Michaels, posted below.

Our prompt was: “Write about a pair of socks.”

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

Held by Anne Michaels pg. 11-12

The black lines of the trees reminded him of a winter field he'd once seen from the window of a train. And the black sea of evening, and the deep black bonnet and apron of his grandmother climbing up from the harbour, knitting all the while, leading their ancient donkey burdened with heavy baskets of crab. All the women in the village wore their tippie and carried their knitting easy to hand, under their arm or in their apron pocket, sleeves and sweater- fronts, filigree work, growing steadily over the course of the day. Each village with its own stitch; you could name a sailor’s home port by the pattern of his gansey, which contained a further signature - a deliberate error by which each knitter could identify her work. Was an error deliberately made still an error? 

Coastal Knitters cast their stitches like a protective spell to keep their men safe and warm and dry, the oil in the wool repelling the rain and sea spray, armour passed down, father to son. They knitted shorter sleeves that did not need to be pushed out of the way of work. Dense worsted, faded by the salt wind. The ridge and furrow stitch, like the fields in March when they put in the potatoes. The moss stitch, the rope stitch, the honeycomb, the triple sea wave, the anchor; the hailstone stitch, the lightning, diamonds, ladders, chains, cables, squares, fishnets, arrows, flags, rigging. The Noordwijk bramble stitch. The black-and-white socks of Terschelling (two white threads, a single black). The Goedereede zigzag. The tree of life. The eye of God over the wearer’s heart.

Credit: Anne Michaels