Thank you to everyone who joined for this session!

For this session we close-read the poem “You Are Old, Father William” by Lewis Carroll, posted below.

Our prompt for this session was: “Write about a person who surprised you.”

More details on this session will be posted, so check back!

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 October 29th at 12pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions page.

You Are Old, Father William by Lewis Carroll


"You are old, father William," the young man said,
    "And your hair has become very white;
  And yet you incessantly stand on your head —
    Do you think, at your age, it is right?"

  "In my youth," father William replied to his son,
    "I feared it would injure the brain;
  But now that I'm perfectly sure I have none,
    Why, I do it again and again."

  "You are old," said the youth, "as I mentioned before,
    And have grown most uncommonly fat;
  Yet you turned a back-somersault in at the door —
    Pray, what is the reason of that?"

  "In my youth," said the sage, as he shook his grey locks,
    "I kept all my limbs very supple
  By the use of this ointment — one shilling the box —
    Allow me to sell you a couple."

  "You are old," said the youth, "and your jaws are too weak
    For anything tougher than suet;
  Yet you finished the goose, with the bones and the beak —
    Pray, how did you manage to do it?"

  "In my youth," said his father, "I took to the law,
    And argued each case with my wife;
  And the muscular strength, which it gave to my jaw,
    Has lasted the rest of my life."

  "You are old," said the youth; one would hardly suppose
    That your eye was as steady as ever;
  Yet you balanced an eel on the end of your nose —
    What made you so awfully clever?"

  "I have answered three questions, and that is enough,"
    Said his father; "don't give yourself airs!
  Do you think I can listen all day to such stuff?
    Be off, or I'll kick you down stairs!"

Thank you to everyone who joined for this session!

For this session we close-read an excerpt from “Survival Math” by Mitchell Jackson, posted below.

Our prompt for this session was: “Write an imagined history of an ancestor.”

More details on this session will be posted, so check back!

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 October 25th at 6pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions page.

Survival Math: Prologue by Mitchell Jackson

Dear Marcus,

     Ain’t no way you could know this, but you were the first of us to set foot on the land that became the state where I was born – Oregon. And now here we are, strangers but not estranged, more like kindred, more like forevermore tethered to terra firma by death date and birth date. Yours: August 16, 1788. Mine: August 16, 1975. Here I am centuries after your death, wanting to share with you what has become of the place where you gasped your last breath and I gloried my first.

   There’s much I don’t know about your living-and-breathing in Cape Verde, so I’ve envisioned what it was like, have pictured you hanging near the ports – burnished, famished bleary-eyed – proclaiming to anybody with ears that you’d board a ship bound for the New World and change forevermore your fortune. Then Captain Robert Gray and his crew docked their sloop for a little R&R and refitting. The way I picture it, Gray trekked inland and highsighted about how historic his voyage would be, and how he’d captain Lady Washington around the Cape Horn and through the Drake Passage to America’s west coast to trade trinkets for furs and sail on to China, about how he was looking to add a new member to his small crew. As I imagine it, his notice sounded to you like the ocean looked in your dreams. So, you fat-mouthed to Gray and crew how much you knew about seafaring, how quick you could learn what you didn’t know, big-upped how good you were with your hands, how able a swimmer you were, the super thew in your thin arms and legs, declared if there was a challenge to be met, you’d meet it, so help you God!

   Whatever your pitch, sure enough you were soon aboard the ship and sailing around the horn for this New World. What were those days like? Did you expect to watch the sunset over the horizon, to witness a full moon in a sky spent with stars, to hear the music of the sails catching the wind, but instead sorrowed over gales bashing the yards, a tempest tossing the ship on her broadside, Gray yelling, “All hands on deck”?

Thank you to everyone who joined for this session!

For this session we close-read the an excerpt from “Bewilderment” by Richard Powers, posted below.

Our prompt for this session was: “Write about knowing that the world is alive.”

More details on this session will be posted, so check back!

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

Powers, Richard. Bewilderment. 2021. New York: W.W. Norton. [page 173]

Yet Kepler never saw a single planet straight on. It cast a wide net, watching for the faintest imaginable dimming of suns many parsecs away, and it gathered that light with a precision of a couple dozen parts per million. Infinitesimal dips in the brightness of stars betrayed invisible planets passing in front of them. It still stupefies me: like seeing a moth crawl across a streetlight from thirty thousand miles away.

         But Kepler couldn’t give me what I wanted: to know, beyond all doubt, that one other world out there was alive. I don’t know why it meant so much to me, when it left so many people cold. Not even my wife really cared all that much one way or another. Robbie did.

         To know for certain whether a planet breathed, we needed direct infrared images fine enough to yield detailed spectral fingerprints of their atmospheres. We had the power to get them. For longer than Robbie had been alive—longer than Aly and I were together—I’d been one of the researchers planning a space-based telescope that could populate my every model and decide forever whether the universe was barren or alive. The craft we were backing was a hundred times more powerful than Hubble. It made our best existing telescopes look like old men with dark glasses and service dogs.

         It was also a wild fling of cash and effort that made no practical difference in the world. It wouldn’t enrich the future or cure a single disease or protect anyone from the rising flood of our craziness. It would simply answer the thing we humans had been asking since we came down from the trees: was the mind of God inclined toward life, or did we Earthlings have no business being here?

Thank you to everyone who joined for this session!

For this session we close-read the poem the “A Portable Paradise” by Roger Robinson, posted below.

Our prompt for this session was: “My paradise…”

More details on this session will be posted, so check back!

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 October 18th at 6pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions page.

A Portable Paradise - by Roger Robinson

And if I speak of Paradise,
then I’m speaking of my grandmother
who told me to carry it always
on my person, concealed, so
no one else would know but me.
That way they can’t steal it, she’d say.
And if life puts you under pressure,
trace its ridges in your pocket,
smell its piney scent on your handkerchief,
hum its anthem under your breath.
And if your stresses are sustained and daily,
get yourself to an empty room – be it hotel,
hostel or hovel – find a lamp
and empty your paradise onto a desk:
your white sands, green hills and fresh fish.
Shine the lamp on it like the fresh hope
of morning, and keep staring at it till you sleep.

Thank you to everyone who joined for this session!

For this session we closely viewed photographs from the “Kitchen Table Series” by Carrie Mae Weems, posted below.

Our prompt for this session was: “What brings you to the table?”

More details on this session will be posted, so check back!

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

Thank you to everyone who joined for this session!

For this session we close read “Manhattan is a Lenape Word” by Natalie Diaz, posted below.

Our prompt for this session was: “Write about where you are.”

More details on this session will be posted, so check back!

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 October 13th at 1pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions page.

“Manhattan is a Lenape Word” by Natalie Diaz


It is December and we must be brave.

The ambulance’s rose of light
blooming against the window.
Its single siren-cry: Help me.
A silk-red shadow unbolting like water
through the orchard of her thigh.

Her, come—in the green night, a lion.
I sleep her bees with my mouth of smoke,
dip honey with my hands stung sweet
on the darksome hive.
Out of the eater I eat. Meaning,
She is mine, colony.

The things I know aren’t easy:
I’m the only Native American
on the 8th floor of this hotel or any,
looking out any window
of a turn-of-the-century building
in Manhattan.

Manhattan is a Lenape word.
Even a watch must be wound.
How can a century or a heart turn
if nobody asks, Where have all
the natives gone?

If you are where you are, then where
are those who are not here? Not here.
Which is why in this city I have
many lovers. All my loves
are reparations loves.

What is loneliness if not unimaginable
light and measured in lumens—
an electric bill which must be paid,
a taxi cab floating across three lanes
with its lamp lit, gold in wanting.
At 2 a.m. everyone in New York City
is empty and asking for someone.

Again, the siren’s same wide note:
Help me. Meaning, I have a gift
and it is my body, made two-handed
of gods and bronze.

She says, You make me feel
like lightning. I say, I don’t ever
want to make you feel that white.
It’s too late—I can’t stop seeing
her bones. I’m counting the carpals,
metacarpals of her hand inside me.

One bone, the lunate bone, is named
for its crescent outline. Lunatus. Luna.
Some nights she rises like that in me,
like trouble—a slow luminous flux.

The streetlamp beckons the lonely
coyote wandering West 29th Street
by offering its long wrist of light.
The coyote answers by lifting its head
and crying stars.

Somewhere far from New York City,
an American drone finds then loves
a body—the radiant nectar it seeks
through great darkness—makes
a candle-hour of it, and burns
gently along it, like American touch,
an unbearable heat.

The siren song returns in me,
I sing it across her throat: Am I
what I love? Is this the glittering world
I’ve been begging for?



From Postcolonial Love Poem (Graywolf Press, 2020) by Natalie Diaz. 
Copyright © 2020 by Natalie Diaz.

Thank you to everyone who joined for this session!

For this session we close read “Equinox” by Elizabeth Alexander, posted below.

Our prompt for this session was: “There is no other way to say…”

More details on this session will be posted, so check back!

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

“Equinox” by Elizabeth Alexander

Now is the time of year when bees are wild 
and eccentric. They fly fast and in cramped 
loop-de-loops, dive-bomb clusters of conversants 
in the bright, late-September out-of-doors. 
I have found their dried husks in my clothes. 

They are dervishes because they are dying, 
one last sting, a warm place to squeeze 
a drop of venom or of honey. 
After the stroke we thought would be her last 
my grandmother came back, reared back and slapped 

a nurse across the face. Then she stood up, 
walked outside, and lay down in the snow. 
Two years later there is no other way 
to say, we are waiting. She is silent, light 
as an empty hive, and she is breathing.



From Crave Radiance: New and Selected Poems 1990-2010. 
Copyright © 2010 by Elizabeth Alexander.

Thank you to everyone who joined for this session!

For this session we close read “Public Transportation” by Elaine Sexton, posted below.

Our prompt for this session was in two parts. First we wrote to “Write about the person others think you are.” Then we wrote to “Write about what others don’t see or know.”

More details on this session will be posted, so check back!

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

“Public Transportation” by Elaine Sexton

She is perfectly ordinary, a cashmere scarf
snugly wrapped around her neck. She is
a middle age that is crisp, appealing in New York.
She is a brain surgeon or a designer of blowdryers.
I know this because I am in her skin this morning
riding the bus, happy to be not young, happy to be
thrilled that it is cold and I have a warm hat on.
Everyone is someone other than you think
under her skin. The driver does not have
a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in his metal 
lunchbox. He has caviar left over from New Year's
and a love note from his mistress, whom he just left
on the corner of Sixth Avenue and 14th Street.
When she steps off his bus to take over the wheel
of the crosstown No. 8, she knows she is anything
but ordinary. She climbs under the safety bar
and straps the belt on over her seat. She lets
the old lady who is rich but looks poor take her time
getting on. She lets the mugger who looks like
a parish priest help her. She waits as we sit, quiet 
in our private, gorgeous lives.



From Sleuth by Elaine Sexton. 
Copyright © 2003 by Elaine Sexton.