Thank you to everyone who joined for this session!

Our text for this session was a revisitation of the poem “Monet Refuses the Operation” by Lisel Mueller, posted below.

Our prompt for this session was two part. The first was to begin your writing with: “Doctor, if only you could see…” The second was to continue with “Doctor, if only I could see…”

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 April 26th at 6pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions page.

Monet Refuses the Operation
BY LISEL MUELLER

Doctor, you say there are no haloes
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don’t see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.
Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space,
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.
What can I say to convince you
the Houses of Parliament dissolve
night after night to become
the fluid dream of the Thames?
I will not return to a universe
of objects that don’t know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent.  The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.
To paint the speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with air
and change our bones, skin, clothes
to gases.  Doctor,
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.

Lisel Mueller, "Monet Refuses the Operation" 
from Second Language. 
Copyright © 1996 by Lisel Mueller.

Thank you to everyone who joined for this session!

Today’s narrative journey started with an excerpt from the NY Times “Opinion” essay “You Can Hear the Whistle Blow a Hundred Miles” by Margaret Renkl, posted below. “Tell me something about this person” opened up our discussion of the female narrator who seemed to be on a train at night, and possibly in a state of uncertainty. On the surface, “I know you think I’m making this up” and “misremembering” made us consider the narrator’s reliability, and reflect on why/if that was problematic as reader/listeners. We returned to the text and recognized what was there (a book, a light, darkness, a harmonica) as well as what wasn’t there (people gazing at phones, iPads, or laptops). This created for us a sense of nostalgic sight-and-soundtracks that evoked camp songs, train songs, and a respect for the narrator’s imagination. We avoided the temptation to “diagnose” the narrator, although “My eyes suddenly too blurred to read” made us wonder if it was a moment of fatigue, sadness, crying, longing or a combination.

Our prompt for this session was: “Describe an aching kind of sound.”

One reflection was a brief-yet-detailed cinematic journey that started with a door creaking on hinges “as old as our relationship” and then shutting, as a figure lay in the bed under the sheets. We also heard a story that started with the excitement of impending birth and moved us through the fear and anxiety of labor as we heard the long, low, unearthly moan that signifies motherhood. Another reflection explored the aching sound of a childhood memory, being in bed and hearing a distant train whistle — silence that is heavy, broken by sadness and longing; but also feeling like a warm blanket, a time now lost bringing both ache and comfort. Another writer shared a moment while “chopping veggies” that quickly felt like being “cut to pieces” by the blaring sound of a song once “ours” no longer being shared. And one reflection brought us back to our present experience in “lockdown” when a plaintive melody once familiar, is now changed forever to a sound of grief for our losses.

A closing comment in the chat apropos to Narrative Medicine pointed out that each of us is like an individual instrument adding our voice or clear notes to the music, responding to the aching sounds/voices that we hear through our Narrative Work.

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 April 19th at 6pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions page.

When they turned off the cabin lights and my seatmate closed her eyes to sleep, I tucked my book under my arm and made my way to the club car. There the overhead lights were off, too, but a single light shone above the table at each booth. A few people were reading. One was playing a hand of solitaire. I don’t remember if nobody was talking, or if the sound of the train moving down the tracks simply masked their quiet voices. “If you miss the train I’m on, you will know that I am gone.”

As I made my way to an open booth, darkness gathered outside the windows and in the corners of the car. Darkness swept across the floor and curled around the ceiling, and that’s when an old man at the far end of the car started to play a slow, sad song on the harmonica. It was the kind of music that fills a silence with longing and gives a voice to loneliness, and without needing any words at all. The aching kind of sound you would swear you could hear a hundred miles.

I know you think I’m making this up, or only misremembering myself as the tragic heroine of a movie where Willie Nelson plays a cameo role. But this part of the story I remember perfectly. Those thin, plaintive notes reached through the shadows and found me as I sat down alone, my eyes suddenly too blurred to read.

Margaret Renkl, You Can Hear the Whistle Blow a Hundred Miles, NYT April 2021

Thank you to everyone who joined for this session!

Our text was an excerpt from “Meditations for a Savage Child” by Adrienne Rich from her collection Diving into the Wreck, posted below.

Our prompt for this session was: “Write about no longer knowing.”

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 April 14th at 12pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions page.

II.  
from “Meditations for a Savage Child”

I keep thinking about the lesson of the human ear
which stands for music, which stands for balance-
or the cat’s ear which I can study better
the whorls and ridges exposed 
It seems a hint dropped about the inside of a skull
which I cannot see
lobe, zone, that part of the brain
which is pure survival

The most primitive part
I go back into at night
pushing the leathern curtain
with naked fingers
then 
with naked body 

There every wound is registered
as scar tissue

A cave of scars!
ancient, archaic wallpaper
built up, layer on layer
from the earliest, dream-white
to yesterday’s a red-black scrawl
a red mouth slowly closing

Go back so far there is another language
go back far enough the language
is no longer personal

these scars bear witness
but whether to repair
or to destruction
I no longer know

from Diving Into the Wreck (1971-1972)
By Adrienne Rich

Thank you to everyone who joined for this session!

Our text was a page from the manga graphic novel Dementia 21 by Shintaro Kago, posted below.

Our prompt for this session, again, was: “Write about the number one job.”

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

Thank you to everyone who joined for this session! In honor of just having passed our one-year anniversary of launching our virtual group sessions, we are revisiting a text that was unfortunately interrupted one year ago.

That text is “The Mailman” by Nazim Hikmet, posted below.

Our prompt for this session, again, was: “Write a letter you’d like to deliver.”

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 April 9th at 12pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions page.

The Mailman, Nazim Hikmet  from Hungarian travel notes
Author(s): NAZIM HIKMET, Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk
Source: The American Poetry Review, Vol. 23, No. 2 (MARCH/APRIL 1994), pp. 38-39
Published by: Old City Publishing, Inc.
 
Whether at dawn or in the middle of the night,
I've carried people news
– of other people, the world, and my country,
               of trees, the birds and the beasts –
                               in the bag of my heart.
I've been a poet,
                which is a kind of mailman.
As a child, I wanted to be a mailman,
not via poetry or anything
but literally – a real mail carrier.
In geography books and Jules Verne's novels
my colored pencils drew a thousand different pictures
                 of the same mailman– Nazim.
Here, I'm driving a dogsled
                                                            over ice,
canned goods and mail packets
                                                           glint in the Arctic twilight:
I'm crossing the Bering Strait.
Or here, under the shadow of heavy clouds on the steppe,
I'm handing out mail to soldiers and drinking kefir.
Or here, on the humming asphalt of a big city,
I bring only good news
                                                                 and hope.
Or I'm in the desert, under the stars,
a little girl lies burning up with fever,
and there's a knock on the door at midnight:
"Mailman!"
The little girl opens her big blue eyes:
her father will come home from prison tomorrow.
I was the one who found that house in the snowstorm
and gave the neighbor girl the telegram.
As a child, I wanted to be a mailman.
But it's a difficult art in my Turkey.
In that beautiful country
                a mailman bears all manner of pain in telegrams
                                and line on line of grief in letters.
As a child, I wanted to be a mailman.
I got my wish in Hungary at fifty.
Spring is in my bag, letters full of the Danube's shimmer,
                                                                  the twitter of birds,
and the smell of fresh grass –
letters from the children of Budapest
                                to children in Moscow.
Heaven is in my bag . . .
One envelope
writes:
"Memet, Nazim Hikmet's son,
                                 Turkey."
Back in Moscow I'll deliver the letters
to their addresses one by one.
Only Memet's letter I can't deliver
or even send.
Nazim's son,
highwaymen block the roads –
                                 your letter can't get through.

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

Our text for this session was the poem “Perennials“ by Maggie Smith, posted below.

Our prompt was: “Write about something you praise.“

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 April 5th at 6pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions page.

Perennials by Maggie Smith

Let us praise the ghost gardens
of Gary, Detroit, Toledo—abandoned

lots where perennials wake
in competent dirt and frame the absence

of a house. You can hear
the sound of wind, which isn’t

wind at all, but leaves touching.
Wind itself can’t speak. It needs another

to chime against, knock around.
Again and again the wind finds its tongue,

but its tongue lives outside
of its rusted mouth. Forget the wind.

Let us instead praise meadow and ruin,
weeds and wildflowers seeding

years later. Let us praise the girl
who lives in what they call

a transitional neighborhood—
another way of saying not dead?

Or risen from it? Before running
full speed through the sprinkler’s arc,

she tells her mother, who kneels
in the garden: Pretend I’m racing

someone else. Pretend I’m winning.



Copyright © 2018 Maggie Smith. 
This poem originally appeared in The Southern Review, Summer 2018.

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

Our text for this session was an excerpt from Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? by Lorrie Moore, posted below.

For prompts, we had a choice between: “Write about being strung along the same wire of a song.” or “Write about being stuck deep in the brain and low in the spine.”

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 March 31st at 12pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions page.

From Lorrie Moore’s (1994) Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?

There was an April afternoon, when I was in the tenth grade when the Girls’ choir had to meet for its final rehearsal before the spring concert. The sun was pouring in through the gym windows, and when we took our places on the bleachers we were standing in it, like something celestial lowered in. Our director, Miss Field, began to wave her arms at us, and a strange spell came over our throats. Our nerves tightened and all the bones of our ears fell in line. It was Miss Field’s own arrangement of a Schubert rhapsody, and the notes, for once, took flight.  I didn’t, couldn’t, catch Sils’s eye—she was standing over with the sopranos—but it didn’t matter, I didn’t have to, because this wasn’t personal, this singing, this light, this was girls, after weeks of rehearsal celebrating the ethereal work of their voices, the bell–like, birdlike, child–sound they could still make so strongly in unison. Strung along the same wire of song, we lost ourselves; out of separate rose and lavender mouths we formed a single living thing, like a hyacinth. It seemed even then a valedictory chorus to our childhood and struck us deep in the brain and low in the spine, like a call, and in its wave and swell lifted us, I swear, to the ceiling in astonishment and bliss, we sounded that beautiful. All of us could hear it, aloft in the bliss of it, no boys, no parents in the room, no one else to tell us, though we never managed to sound that beautiful again. In all my life as a woman—which began soon after, and not unrichly, I have never known such a moment. Though sometimes in my brain I go back to that afternoon, to relive it, sail up there again toward the acoustic panels, the basketball hoops, and the old oak clock, the careful harmonies set loose from our voices so pure and exact and light we wondered later, packing to leave, how high and fast and far they had gone.