Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we read a poem “Bird-Understander” by Craig Arnold, posted below.

Our prompt was: “Write about when words fail.”

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

"Bird-Understander" by Craig Arnold

Of many reasons I love you here is one

the way you write me from the gate at the airport
so I can tell you everything will be alright

so you can tell me there is a bird
trapped in the terminal      all the people
ignoring it       because they do not know
what to do with it       except to leave it alone
until it scares itself to death

it makes you terribly terribly sad

You wish you could take the bird outside
and set it free or       (failing that)
call a bird-understander
to come help the bird

All you can do is notice the bird
and feel for the bird       and write
to tell me how language feels
impossibly useless

but you are wrong

You are a bird-understander
better than I could ever be
who make so many noises
and call them song

These are your own words
your way of noticing
and saying plainly
of not turning away
from hurt

you have offered them
to me       I am only
giving them back

if only I could show you
how very useless
they are not


Craig Arnold, "Bird-Understander." Copyright 2009 by Craig Arnold.

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we read a poem “Medical History” by Eleanor Stanford, posted below.

Our prompt was a choice between: “Write about a parallel conversation.” OR Begin writing with “The pain started…”

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 16th at 12pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions.

"Medical History" by Eleanor Stanford

When did the pain start?
Three weeks ago, Saturday.
Deep breath.
It comes and goes.
When did the pain—
It started with my mother.
When?
In 1979, the grey skies of São Paolo, summer a hammered 
             metal helmet.
I’m sorry. My hands are cold. Again?
In Bavaria, before I was born, when my grandfather held the four 
             tasseled corners of the world in his hands and prayed.
Other side.
In a lacquer factory in Hokkaido: the gloss, the stink, the smooth
	    reflective surface.
When?
1934. 1968. When I was five, and learned to move from one element 
            to another. Water to air. Dark to
The pain?
Stabbing. Dull. A branch extending from—
Higher?
Lower.
The pain?
Yes. A tight-stitched shawl. A lacquer bowl—
Here? Where the stomach—
burnished vessel,
meets the ilium.
Ornamental thread I don’t believe in.
Tender? 
Yes. 


Eleanor Stanford
Subtropics: The Literary Journal of the University of Florida 
Issue 19: Spring/Summer 015

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we took a close look at “Tar Beach” by Faith Ringgold, posted below.

Our prompt was: “Write about what you will always remember.”

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

“Tar Beach” by Faith Ringgold

Credit: Faith Ringgold (1996.) New York: Penguin Random House

I will always remember when the stars fell down  around me and lifted me up above the George Washington Bridge
 
I could see our tiny roof top with Mommy and Daddy and Mr. and Mrs. Honey, our next door neighbors, still playing cards
as if nothing was going on, and Be Be, my baby brother, laying real still on the mattress, just like I told him to, his eyes like huge floodlights tracking me through the 
sky.
 
Sleeping on Tar Beach was magical. Laying on the roof in the night with starts and skyscraper buildings all around me made me feel rich, like I owned all that I could see. The bridge was my most prized possession.
 
Daddy said the George Washington Bridge was the longest and most beautiful bridge in the world and that it opened in 1931 on the very day I was born. Daddy worked on the bridge, hoisting cables. Since then, I’ve wanted that bridge to be mine.
 
Now I have claimed it all. All I had to do was fly over it for it to be mine forever. I can wear it like a giant diamond necklace, or just fly over it and marvel at its sparkling beauty. I can fly, yes, fly. Me, Cassie Louise Lightfoot, only eight years old and in the third grade and I can fly.

That means I am free to go wherever I want to for the 
rest of my life.
     Daddy took me to see the new union building he is
working on. He can walk on steel girders high up in the
sky and not fall. They call him The Cat.
 
But still he can’t join the union because Grandpa wasn’t a member. Well Daddy is going to own the building cause I’m gonna fly over it and give it to him. Then it won’t matter that he’s not in their ole union or whether he’s colored or a half breed Indian like they say.
 
He’ll be rich and won’t have to stand on 24 story high girders and look down. He can look up at his building going up. And Mommy won’t cry all winter when Daddy goes to look for work and doesn’t come home. And Mommy can laugh and sleep late like Mrs. Honey and we can have ice cream every night for dessert.
 
Next I’m going to fly over the ice cream factory just to 
make sure we do.
      Tonight we’re going up to Tar Beach. Mommy is roasting peanuts and frying chicken and Daddy will bring home a watermelon. Mr. and Mrs. Honey will the beer and their old green card table. And then the stars will fall around me and I will fly to the union building.
 
I’ll take Be Be with me. He has threatened to tell Mommy and Daddy if I leave him behind.  
    I have told him it’s very easy, anyone can fly. All
you need is somewhere to go that you can’t get to any other way.  The next thing you know, you’ll be flying among the stars.

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we took a close look at “Encaustic, acrylic on paper bag, pencil, vellum, masking tape” by Marn Jensen, from Art of the Wish posted below.

Our prompt was: “What carries you?”

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

“Encaustic, acrylic on paper bag, pencil, vellum, masking tape” by Marn Jensen, from Art of the Wish

Credit: Marn Jensen

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we took a close listen to “I’ll Fly Away” by Albert E. Brumley, posted below.

Our prompt was: “Start with ‘I’ll fly away.’”

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 May 19th at 12pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions.

"I’ll Fly Away" by Albert E. Brumley

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we took a close look at an image from “Guillermo del Toro, Pinocchio (2022)” and read a poem published in Sappho: One Hundred Lyrics (Chatto and Windus, 1907), posted below.

Our prompt was: Write beginning with the words “ Dear Sappho.”

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

XII
	Sappho 
 
In a dream I spoke with the Cyprus-born,
      And said to her,
"Mother of beauty, mother of joy,
Why hast thou given to men
 
 
"This thing called love, like the ache of a wound
      In beauty's side,
To burn and throb and be quelled for an hour
And never wholly depart?"
 
And the daughter of Cyprus said to me,
      "Child of the earth,
Behold, all things are born and attain,
But only as they desire,—
 
"The sun that is strong, the gods that are wise,
     The loving heart,
Deeds and knowledge and beauty and joy,—
But before all else was desire.

This poem was published in Sappho: One Hundred Lyrics (Chatto and Windus, 1907), translated by Bliss Carman.

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we read a poem “Ending the Estrangement” by Ross Gay, posted below.

Our prompt was: “Write about ending an estrangement.”

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 May 8th at 6pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions.

"Ending the Estrangement" by Ross Gay

from my mother's sadness, which was,
to me, unbearable, until,
it felt to me 
not like what I thought it felt like
to her, and so felt inside myself—like death,
like dying, which I would almost
have rather done, though adding to her sadness
would rather die than do—
but, by sitting still, like what, in fact, it was—
a form of gratitude
which when last it came
drifted like a meadow lit by torches
of cardinal flower, one of whose crimson blooms,
when a hummingbird hovered nearby,
I slipped into my mouth
thereby coaxing the bird
to scrawl on my tongue
its heart's frenzy, its fleet
nectar-questing song,
with whom, with you, dear mother,
I now sing along.

Ross Gay, "Ending the Estrangement" from Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude. Copyright © 2015 by Ross Gay.  Reprinted by permission of University of Pittsburgh Press.
Source: Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015)

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we read a poem “Instructions on Not Giving Up” by Ada Limón, posted below.

Our prompt was: “Start with ‘I’ll take it all.’”

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 May 5th at 12pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions.

"Instructions on Not Giving Up" by Ada Limón

More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.

Copyright © 2017 by Ada Limón. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 15, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets.

Thank you to everyone who joined us to celebrate our *300th* virtual group session!

For this session we read a poem “Small Kindnesses” by Danusha Laméris, posted below.

Our prompt was: “Begin with the word ‘Strangers…‘”

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

"Small Kindnesses" by Danusha Laméris        
 
I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk
down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs
to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you”
when someone sneezes, a leftover
from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying.
And sometimes, when you spill lemons
from your grocery bag, someone else will help you
pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.
We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,
and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile
at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress
to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder,
and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.
We have so little of each other, now. So far
from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.
What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these
fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here,
have my seat,” “Go ahead—you first,” “I like your hat.”

The New York Times (9/19/2019),   Bonfire Opera