Thank you to everyone who joined for this session!

Our text for this session was the poem Men at My Father’s Funeral by William Matthews, posted below.

Our prompt for this session was: “Write an elegy about someone lost.”

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

Men at My Father’s Funeral
By William Matthews

The ones his age who shook my hand
on their way out sent fear along
my arm like heroin. These weren’t
men mute about their feelings,
or what’s a body language for?
 
And I, the glib one, who’d stood
with my back to my father’s body
and praised the heart that attacked him?
I’d made my stab at elegy,
the flesh made word: the very spit
 
in my mouth was sour with ruth
and eloquence. What could be worse?
Silence, the anthem of my father’s
new country. And thus this babble,
like a dial tone, from our bodies.


William Matthews, “Men at My Father’s Funeral” 
from Time and Money: New Poems. 
Copyright © 1995 by William Matthews.

Thank you to everyone who joined for this session!

Our text for this session was The Nobodies by Eduardo Galeano (translated by Cedric Belfrage), posted below.

Our prompt for this session was: “Write about the dreams of the nobodies.”

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 July 14th at 6pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions page.

Los Nadies (Eduardo Galeano)
Sueñan las pulgas con comprarse un perro
y sueñan los nadies con salir de pobre,
que algún mágico día llueva de pronto la buena suerte,
que llueva a cántaros la buena suerte:
pero la buena suerte no llueve ayer,
ni hoy ni mañana ni nunca,
ni en llovizna cae del cielo la buena suerte,
por mucho que los nadies la llamen y aunque les pique
la mano izquierda,
o se levanten con el pie derecho,
o empiecen el año cambiando de escoba.
Los nadies:
los hijos de nadie, los dueños de nada.
Los nadies,
los ningunos, los ninguneados.
Corriendo las liebres, muriendo la vida, jodidos,
rejodidos:
Que no son, aunque sean.
Que no hablan idiomas sino dialectos.
Que no profesan religiones, sino supersticiones.
Que no hacen arte, sino artesanía.
Que no practican cultura, sino folclore.
Que no son seres humanos, sino recursos humanos.
Que no tienen cara, sino brazos.
Que no tienen nombre, sino número.
Que no figuran en la historia universal.
Sino en las páginas rojas de la prensa local.
Los nadies.
Que cuestan menos que la bala que los mata.

The Nobodies by Eduardo Galeano (translated by Cedric Belfrage)
Fleas dream of buying themselves a dog, and nobodies dream of escaping poverty: that one magical day good luck will suddenly rain down on them–will rain down in buckets. But good luck doesn’t rain down yesterday, today, tomorrow, or ever. Good luck doesn’t even fall in a fine drizzle, no matter how hard the nobodies summon it, even if their left hand is tickling, or if they begin the new day with their right foot, or start the new year with a change of brooms.

The nobodies: nobody’s children, owners of nothing.
The nobodies: the no ones, the nobodied, running like rabbits, dying through life, screwed every which way.

Who are not, but could be.
Who don’t speak languages, but dialects.
Who don’t have religions, but superstitions.
Who don’t create art, but handicrafts.
Who don’t have culture, but folklore.
Who are not human beings, but human resources.
Who do not have faces, but arms.
Who do not have names, but numbers.
Who do not appear in the history of the world, but in the police blotter of the local paper.
The nobodies, who are not worth the bullet that kills them.

Thank you to everyone who joined for this session!

For this session our text was the poem I Will Be My Mother’s Apprentice by Carmen Giménez Smith, posted below.

Our prompt for this session was: “Write about being the remedy or the anchor.”

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

I WILL BE MY MOTHER’S APPRENTICE

as if I were a hunger because
it is our bleak and common future
to reverse the sphinx. I study the meander
of her logic for context. Sometimes it is
like a poem that is not quite realized
filled with hollows and bursts,
a stranger’s grief and rage. She asks
for home when she’s home. She screams
for the purse we haven’t hidden from her.
Sometimes we circle the same spots,
and I try to be as I know she was with me
once: remedy and anchor. I’m a fair
to poor replica, yet still her proxy.

That you didn’t know her is your
misfortune: a hot planet’s core,
late summer’s best light. As metaphor
I evoke a pink, vulnerable jelly,
translucent and containing the past.
I hold it in my hand and against a lamp.
This is our intimacy now. My nails trace
the brown spots that mark her losses.
Beautiful and sad and strange, I say,
because I’ve made her into something else.

“I Will Be My Mother’s Apprentice,” from Be Recorder. 
Copyright © 2019 by Carmen Giménez Smith

Thank you to everyone who joined for this session!

For this session our text was the short story Girl by Jamaica Kincaid, posted below.

Our prompt for this session was: “Write a set of directions.”

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

Girl by Jamaica Kincaid

Wash the white clothes on Monday and put them on the stone heap; wash the color clothes on Tuesday and put them on the clothesline to dry; don’t walk bare-head in the hot sun; cook pumpkin fritters in very hot sweet oil; soak your little cloths right after you take them off; when buying cotton to make yourself a nice blouse, be sure that it doesn’t have gum in it, because that way it won’t hold up well after a wash; soak salt fish overnight before you cook it; is it true that you sing benna in Sunday school?; always eat your food in such a way that it won’t turn someone else’s stomach; on Sundays try to walk like a lady and not like the slut you are so bent on becoming; don’t sing benna in Sunday school; you mustn’t speak to wharf-rat boys, not even to give directions; don’t eat fruits on the street—flies will follow you; but I don’t sing benna on Sundays at all and never in Sunday school; this is how to sew on a button; this is how to make a buttonhole for the button you have just sewed on; this is how to hem a dress when you see the hem coming down and so to prevent yourself from looking like the slut I know you are so bent on becoming; this is how you iron your father’s khaki shirt so that it doesn’t have a crease; this is how you iron your father’s khaki pants so that they don’t have a crease; this is how you grow okra—far from the house, because okra tree harbors red ants; when you are growing dasheen, make sure it gets plenty of water or else it makes your throat itch when you are eating it; this is how you sweep a corner; this is how you sweep a whole house; this is how you sweep a yard; this is how you smile to someone you don’t like too much; this is how you smile to someone you don’t like at all; this is how you smile to someone you like completely; this is how you set a table for tea; this is how you set a table for dinner; this is how you set a table for dinner with an important guest; this is how you set a table for lunch; this is how you set a table for breakfast; this is how to behave in the presence of men who don’t know you very well, and this way they won’t recognize immediately the slut I have warned you against becoming; be sure to wash every day, even if it is with your own spit; don’t squat down to play marbles—you are not a boy, you know; don’t pick people’s flowers—you might catch something; don’t throw stones at blackbirds, because it might not be a blackbird at all; this is how to make a bread pudding; this is how to make doukona; this is how to make pepper pot; this is how to make a good medicine for a cold; this is how to make a good medicine to throw away a child before it even becomes a child; this is how to catch a fish; this is how to throw back a fish you don’t like, and that way something bad won’t fall on you; this is how to bully a man; this is how a man bullies you; this is how to love a man, and if this doesn’t work there are other ways, and if they don’t work don’t feel too bad about giving up; this is how to spit up in the air if you feel like it, and this is how to move quick so that it doesn’t fall on you; this is how to make ends meet; always squeeze bread to make sure it’s fresh; but what if the baker won’t let me feel the bread?; you mean to say that after all you are really going to be the kind of woman who the baker won’t let near the bread?

Thank you to everyone who joined for this session!

For this session we examined the painting Cumulative Losses by Jennifer Packer, posted below.

Our prompt for this session was: “Write about setting things in motion.”

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 June 30th 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 examined the painting Pink Dish and Green Leaves by Georgia O’Keeffe, posted below.

Our prompt for this session was: “Write about inside vs. outside.”

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 June 28th at 6pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions page.

Thank you to everyone who joined for this session!

For this session our text was an excerpt from On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong, posted below.

Our prompt for this session was: “Write about giving a name.”

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

Ocean Vuong, On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous (p. 20)

Before I was Little Dog, I had another name—the name I was born with. One October afternoon in a banana-thatched hut outside Saigon, on the same rice paddy you grew up on, I became your son. As Lan told it, a local shaman and his two helpers rushed in, wrapped me, still sticky with birth, in a white cloth, and raced to the nearby river, where I was bathed under veils of smoke and sage.

          Screaming, ash smudged across my forehead, I was placed in my father’s arms and the shaman whispered the name he had given me. It means Patriotic Leader of the Nation, the shaman explained. Having been hired by my father, and noticing my old man’s gruffness, the way he puffed out his chest to widen his 5ft.-2in frame as he walked, speaking with gestures that resembled blows, the shaman picked a name, I imagine, that would satisfy the man who paid him. And he was right. My father beamed, Lan said, lifting me over his head at the hut’s threshold. “My son will be the leader of Vietnam,” he shouted. But in two years, Vietnam—which, thirteen years after the war and still in shambles—would grow so dire that we would flee the very ground he stood on, the soil where, a few feet, away, your blood had made a dark circle between your legs, turning the dirt there into fresh mud—and I was alive.

Thank you to everyone who joined for this session!

In today’s session, we gathered from across the globe to view Lady Gaga’s short film “911.” After spending about 5 minutes viewing the music video together, we took a few moments to silently review the song’s lyrics and collect our thoughts. THen, we began our close reading discussion with the question, “What is our entry point? How do we find our way in?”

One participant started our discussion by noting how the vivid scenes and colors of the video created a chaos that reflects the traffic accident revealed at the end of the video. We discussed the setting, colors, and costumes that created what some described as a dream, others a nightmare. As we looked closely at the lyrics, we found that perhaps another description of the experience would be one of hallucination or the visual experience of a psychotic breakdown, echoed in the lyrics “my mind takes me to manic places.” Moreover, we reflected on the lyrics continual reference to medication as an escape from the troubles of reality.

We we also struck by the symbolism of the images and objects in the dream state portion of the video, and how they represented parallel images and objects in the scene of the accident: the sand dunes of the LG advertisement create the desert scene of the dream, complete with a dark horseman; the EMS first responders use reflective mirrors in place of pen lights; Lady Gaga’s ankle bracelet serves as her tourniquet.

The piece was moving at both a visual and auditory level, and was a representation of Mental Health, its impact, and the non-linearity of experience, memory and trauma. The imprint of trauma on the brain and its impact to response and behavior. A great way to understand illness in context. 

After a lively discussion, we moved on to our writing prompt: “Draw or describe (or sing!) the beautiful places you keep yourself.” After writing for 4 minutes, we began to share our reflections. One participant offered us a natural garden scene where she could “befriend butterflies” and “eat fragrance.” She held onto the blades, even as “the black suit of emotions” poured like a crushing waterfall. Another participant described a summer hike, a path where a tree “canopy shields me from the world.” She reflected on the energy in the air and the beauty of the flowers. Here, she wrote, is “a place I return to often. A place of respite. A place to rededicate myself to living.” Finally, another participant invited, “come walk with me on the beach.” We reflected on sharing a special place with others, and how we can leave ourselves there. “Pieces of us are still scattered on the shore, among the shells and the starfish.” In these beautiful places, we all found respite.

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 21st at 6pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions page.