We welcomed 21 people to our virtual workshop session, including many returning participants and two newcomers. The text today was a pastel artwork by Richard Wommack, “Television Snow.” With intent, the title was withheld from the participants, who were asked to spend 2 minutes close reading the painting. Then in a break from tradition, participants were asked to consider what the title of this painting might be and to type their thoughts into the chat.

Here are just a few of the many responses: Empty Spaces, The Puzzle, Backyard Monotony, Ghost ‘burbs, Sweet Dream, Fordist Neonscape, Uniformity & Catastrophe and Radioactive Neighborhood. In the discussion that followed, feelings of isolation, sameness, and even danger due to the lack of fences were shared. Several noted the lack of human form and nature, though a sliver of purple sky was observed. The color purple that glowed was seen as either comforting or toxic. The arc of the scene and preponderance of pools (or were they basements minus rooves) prompted discussion of the surreal and dream/nightmare quality of the art. The mood was eerie, dystopian and even angry. Someone noted that this depiction of night felt like the lonliest of times, that though there were no fences to divide the inhabitants they were separate and not communicating, each in their own “castle”. The sense of smell was explored eliciting chlorine, ozonate, metallic, or simply nothing. Finally we “listened” and heard crickets, radiostatic, white noise and silence.

Writing to the prompt “Take us someplace after hours” brought us to internal spaces of “a desperate desire to matter” and an external space where “The night is about to settle…lawnmowers, leaf blowers…the stars would gradually accompany me with their stories as I arrived home.” One writer described a long day with a patient followed by dizziness and blindness that muddles our memory; another wrote a dialogic scene with two rocks in conversation that asked “Was there any life before we came? Are we the only stones to people this land?” Another writer in a medical context described “ears filled with beeps, my heart broken with death.” The group resonated with the description of stepping outside a hospital into the crisp air, a feeling like a resuscitation. Our last writer described a peaceful pandemic space (her daughter’s former bedroom) where she can “lower the light..light  my candle.” 

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

Sixteen participants from India, Maine, Mexico, Michigan, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania—one who was new to our circle—gathered to close read the poem “Snow Mare” by N. Scott Momaday, cognizant of today’s holiday that celebrates indigenous Peoples. Momaday is a member of the Kiowa nation. He is best known for his novel House Made of Dawn, which won the Pulitzer Prize, although he prefers to be recognized as a poet.

The words and phrases that called many people’s attention included:

            bursts of soft commotion

            the burden of being 

(Sorry, everyone, the capitalized “Of” was our transcription error.)

We discussed color, properties of hardness and softness, verbs of being, memory, and the dissolving nature of dreams and memories. We imagined porcelain fields and dreams that bring comfort, all in a background of confectioners’ sugar and gentle hooves. Tonight we also generated a sizeable number of auditory, visual, and literary texts elicited by Momaday’s:

            The Dream of the Blue Turtles (Sting)

            Blue Horses (Mary Oliver poetry collection)

            Big Blue Horses (Franz Marc)

            The Snowman (Wallace Stevens)

            The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Kundera)

Three people read what they wrote to the prompt: Write about bursts of soft commotion.

Each were scenes involving children—a child’s near-death experience of eating/inhaling flour; children romping and squealing in a park; “brain bursts” after falling on ice. One person noted that Momaday’s line “She shears the web of winter” brought her back to last week’s text – Pablo Neruda’s Ode To A Pair of Scissors. We were sorry to lose our fourth reader to an interrupted internet connection. Perhaps she will post her writing on the narrativeblog.com.

Tonight’s session concluded with a three-minute trailer, from a documentary on N. Scott Momaday featured at the Seattle Film Festival in 2019, which is titled “Words from a Bear.”

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

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.

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

Our text was the poem “The Death of Marilyn Monroe” by Sharon Olds, posted below.

Our prompt was: “Write about a time you stood in a doorway.”

More details about this session will be posted soon, 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 12th at 6pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions page.

The Death of Marilyn Monroe  by Sharon Olds

The ambulance men touched her cold
body, lifted it, cold as iron,
onto the stretcher, tried to close the
mouth, closed the eyes, tied the
arms to the sides, moved a caught
strand of hair, as if it mattered,
saw the shape of her breasts, flattened by
gravity, under the sheet,
carried her, as if it were she,
down the steps.

These men were never the same. They went out
afterwards, as they always did,
for a drink or two, but they could not meet
each other’s eyes.

                             Their lives took
a turn--one had nightmares, strange
pains, impotence, depression. One did not
like his work, his wife looked
different, his kids. Even death
seemed different to him–a place where she
would be waiting,

and one found himself standing at night
in the doorway to a room of sleep, listening to a
woman breathing, just an ordinary
woman
breathing.



"Death of Marilyn Monroe," by Sharon Olds 
from The Dead and the Living (Alfred A. Knopf).

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

Our text was the poem “Ode to a Pair of Scissors” by Pablo Neruda, posted below.

Fourteen participants gathered in the clearing this evening, arrived from around the globe (like the well-traveled scissors in Neruda’s ode) representing Bar Harbor, central Pennsylvania, Detroit, India, Manhattan, Montreal, Philadelphia, Pittsford, Sao Paulo, and Staten Island.

Two people read aloud this ode, an extended metaphor that fell down the page. One of the first comments made, after hearing the escapades and serious functions of scissors, was that it will be impossible to ever again look at a pair of scissors in the same way—which is often to take them for granted. Yes, “them”–two blades united in an instrument that cuts.

Neruda left a litany of objects: fabric such as bridal gowns, diapers, suits, and shrouds; fingernails, flags, flesh, hair, knots, and umbilical cords, abstractions: happiness and sadness cut by scissors that look like  birds or fish or schooners or shining armor. as they cut “the fabric of our lives” from cradle to grave.  

In drawing our attention, which someone described as a “close up” of a common thing

To several participants the most puzzling: scissors that fold and fit safely in a pocket. One participant said that she had a pair of folding scissors. One of us remembers “bandage scissors” with one angled/blunt edge that we, as student nurses, kept in a uniform pocket years ago. Safe to tuck into a pocket and safe to introduce under a patient’s bandage and cut off.

Anotherpuzzle: how was the scent of the poem’s speaker’s seamstress aunt left on the metal scissors? What was the scent of that woman?

The poem took one person to her mother’s sewing basket, to the pinking shears (that have given way in this day and age to “fast fashion”—whatever that is some of us wondered—and to all the items her mother sewed, including skating costumes.

Another person told of his mother and father meeting because his mother and his father’s sisters having been seamstresses during the war. He, too, knew pinking shears.

As we discussed the double-ness of “a pair of scissors” a person, who spoke Portuguese noted that the equivalent “tesoura” is a singular noun as it is in Spanish (la tijeras), the language in which Neruda wrote.

Neruda concludes having decided to “cut short” his ode with “the scissors of good sense.

Our prompt was: “Write an ode to something common.”

The humor that we heard, just below the surface, in Neruda’s writing seemed to prompt playfulness in participants’ writing odes to toothbrushes, scavenged pens, the sun, and the flame of a candle.   

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

"Ode to a Pair of Scissors" by Pablo Neruda

Prodigious scissors
(looking like birds, or fish),
you are as polished as a knight’s
shining armor.
 
Two long and treacherous
knives
crossed and bound together
for all time,
two
tiny rivers
joined:
thus was born a creature for cutting,
a fish that swims among billowing linens,
a bird that flies
through
barbershops.
 
Scissors
that smell of
my seamstress
aunt’s
hands
when their vacant
metal eye
spied on
our
cramped childhood,
tattling
to the neighbors
about our thefts of plums and kisses.
There,
in the house,
nestled in their corner,
the scissors crossed
our lives,
and oh so
many lengths of
fabric
that they cut and kept on cutting:
for newlyweds and the dead,
for newborns and hospital wards.
They cut
and kept on cutting,
also the peasant’s
hair
as tough
as a plant that clings to rock,
and flags
soon
stained and scorched
by blood and flame,
and vine
stalks in winter,
and the cord
of
voices
on the telephone.
 
A long-lost pair of scissors
cut your mother’s
thread
from your navel
and handed you for all time
your separate existence.
Another pair, not necessarily
somber,
will one day cut
the suit you wear to your grave.
 
Scissors
have gone
everywhere,
they’ve explored
the world
snipping off pieces of
happiness
and sadness
indifferently.
Everything has been material
for scissors to shape:
the tailor’s
giant
scissors,
as lovely as schooners,
and very small ones
for trimming nails
in the shape
of the waning moon,
and the surgeon’s
slender
submarine scissors
that cut the complications
and the knot that should not have grown inside you. 
 
Now, I’ll cut this ode short
with the scissors
of good sense,
so that it won’t be too long or too short,
so that it
will
fit in your pocket
smoothed and folded
like
a pair
of scissors.
 
                                                                       
Pablo Neruda
Ode to Common Things 
New York: Bullfinch Press: 1994
Translator Ken Krabbenhoft

Our workshop today included 18 participants from across the U.S. as well as
Angola, Athens, Bahrain, and Canada. The group engaged in a silent, slow looking at
the painting Profile/Part I, The Twenties: Pittsburgh Memories, Mill Hand’s Lunch
Bucket, 1978 by Romare Bearden. They then typed into the chat what they saw
immediately and upon closer study. Responses spanned form, function, and a range of
feelings. We noted human figures, open doors, a stove, big hands, multiple frames,
photographs and images, texture, scraps, a window, a ceiling, smoke, and pollution.
Deeper discussion explored what the layered collage’s elements represent — what
meaning could we make? Participants contrasted the flatness of the visual texture
(“water stains or wallpaper?”) with its movement (“almost chaotic”) with a blend of light,
shadow, hands (offering help, or reaching for help?), exploitation of labor, violence,
unspoken truths, family lineage, and a sense of shared experiences. One participant
recognized how multiple margins create a sense of self-referentiality – the process of
creating something despite the pieces refusing to cohere into a narrative. We were left
wondering: are estrangement and fragmentation connected, leading to alienation?

Our writing prompt, “Tell the story of a moment in scraps and remnants” inspired six
readers to share what they wrote in four minutes. The diverse responses included a list
of items that formed a collage, a palimpsest (a manuscript or piece of writing material on
which the original writing has been effaced to make room for later writing but of which
traces remain), and a car trip through Detroit (“Everywhere I lived or worked is
gone”…”Not ruins, something ruined”). Another writer picked up on the painting’s
intergenerational theme by recognizing a grandmother of 14 and describing a history
through war and across generations. The reading of the piece itself was noted as
sounding staccato, which added to the impact of listening. Imagery in other writings
brought to mind people, places and texture (“His hand, his garden, his flannel shirt”) as
well as purpose (a teacher surrounded by books, bricks, and students with a Pink Floyd
mindset “We don’t need no education.”) Our final writer-reader wrote about picking up
the pieces of memory – life’s moments floating away like a kaleidoscope flipping.

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

Fourteen people gathered to discuss poet and psychologist Hala Alyon’s “Spoiler,” a poem published in today’s issue of The New Yorker. Via our weekly survey, we ascertained that all of this evening’s respondents have participated in more than four of our close reading and reflective writing sessions via Zoom on Monday evenings.

After listening to an audio recording by the poet, we silently reviewed this twenty-eight line poem, noting what called to each of us before beginning to share comments with the group.

When we did speak, more than one person said that the poem took them to diagnoses of breast cancer, sharing pain, and listening to others’ processes of living with thoughts prompted about the meaning of their lives. More than one person connected the multiple metaphors appearing in the poem and the multiple metaphors that are used by women living with cancer. One participant heard the poem as “dream logic.”

Other ideas that spoke to us suggested the constancy of “the tides,” that arrive on our shores–forces over which we have no control but which, in the face of, we persist. 

More than one person was attracted to the idea of banishing “nightmares” by naming our fears. 

Enriching our conversation through intertextuality, people quoted from classical texts by Ray Bradbury, T.S. Eliot, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Rumi. Someone suggested that Alyon’s poem “Spoiler” is “a feminist answer” to T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” 

“Quite the poem,” said one woman, who represented what many felt: Spoiler opens us to a strange mixture of anxiety, beauty, grief, pessimism, and peace. In thinking about what the future may have in store for us, we were prompted to reflect on the way we perceive the passing of time, including the “arrival” of the future. It was interesting to compare our modern framework to the way in which the Romans envisioned our relationship with time. Unlike what we think of today (we “look back” to the past and “ahead” towards the future), the Romans thought of themselves as walking with their front to the past (the only thing they knew) and with their back to the future (an uncertain prospect they had no clear view of, being behind). Would this different perspective change the way we think of the past? Would we look at what we’ve built so far differently it is was vividly in front of our eyes as we walk with our back to the future?

Three people read their four- minutes of writing, in the shadow of this difficult text, to the prompt: Write about what you might build knowing that it will be ruined. 

These works were filled with reflections on:

•  what has been ruined and why and what can yet be
• how homo sapiens sapiens (man who knows he knows) could also be called     
• “homofabulans” for our specie’s ability to imagine and archive stories
• the unasked for determinants of life and death and our need for meaning-making in “the gap,” the time and space between them

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, September 30th at 12pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions page.

Spoiler by Hala Alyan

Can you diagnose fear? The red tree blooming from uterus
to throat. It’s one long nerve, the doctor says. There’s a reason
breathing helps, the muscles slackening like a dead marriage.
Mine are simple things. Food poisoning in Paris. Hospital lobbies.
My husband laughing in another room. (The door closed.)
For days, I cradle my breast and worry the cyst like a bead.
There’s nothing to pray away. The tree loves her cutter.
The nightmares have stopped, I tell the doctor. I know why.
They stopped because I baptized them. This is how my mother
and I speak of dying—the thing you turn away by letting in.
I’m tired of April. It’s killed our matriarchs and, in the back yard,
I’ve planted an olive sapling in the wrong soil. There is a droopiness
to the branches that reminds me of my friend, the one who calls
to ask what’s the point, or the patients who come to me, swarmed
with misery and astonishment, their hearts like newborns after
the first needle. What now, they all want to know. What now.
I imagine it like a beach. There is a magnificent sand castle
that has taken years to build. A row of pink seashells for gables,
rooms of pebble and driftwood. This is your life. Then comes the affair,
nagging bloodwork, a freeway pileup. The tide moves in.
The water eats your work like a drove of wild birds. There is debris.
A tatter of sea grass and blood from where you scratched your own arm
trying to fight the current. It might not happen for a long time,
but one day you run your fingers through the sand again, scoop a fistful out,
and pat it into a new floor. You can believe in anything, so why not believe
this will last? The seashell rafter like eyes in the gloaming.
I’m here to tell you the tide will never stop coming in.
I’m here to tell you whatever you build will be ruined, so make it beautiful.

Published in the print edition of 
the September 28, 2020, issue of The New Yorker