Thank you to the 58 of you who joined us for this session!

Our text for this session was an excerpt from There, There by Tommy Orange. (2018) New York: Alfred A. Knopf (text posted below).

Our prompt for the session was: “Write about a rhythm.”

It was wonderful to see new and familiar faces today.  Our group of 58 people zoomed in from Athens, Jerusalem, Lisbon, the UK, many points in Canada and across the USA, from the South Bronx to Santa Monica, from Jacksonville to Shaker Heights.

The Tommy Orange excerpt brought up themes of journeying, dreams of the future, randomness, the inevitable, tempo and time, and being out of step.  And participants responded with clarity and precision to one another’s writing, to the  particularity of images: “an epigenetic storm of immigrant dreams and bereavement,” “a blue light,” “a red rooster clock,” with its tick tock that traveled from home to hospital and back, a balm to one and a bomb to the other.

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.

Please see below for some examples of the kind of writing people produced in just four minutes!

Please join us for our next session: Monday, April 6^th at 6pm EST, with more times to be announced shortly.

AND PLEASE NOTE: in an effort to make these sessions more secure, there will be an individual link for each session with a quick registration. Allow an extra minute to do this when logging in.

Please bookmark the Live Virtual Sessions page (or access directly from the navigation above) – this is where you should always come to find access instructions before each live session.

We look forward to seeing you again soon!

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Text Excerpt from There, There by Tommy Orange:

Before you were born you were a swimmer. You were a race, a dying off, a breaking through, an arrival. Before you were born, you were an egg in your mom who was an egg in her mom. Before you were born, you were the nested Russian grandmother doll of possibility in your mom’s ovaries. You were two halves of a thousand different kinds of possibilities, a million heads or tail, flip-shine on a spun coin. Before you were born, you were the idea to make it to California for gold or bust. You were white, you were brown, you were red, you were dust. You were hiding, you were seeking. Before you were born, you were chased, beaten, broken, trapped on a reservation in Oklahoma. Before you were born, you were an idea your mom got into her head in the seventies, to hitchhike across the country and become a dancer in New York. You were on your way when she did not make it across the country but sputtered and spiraled and wound up in Taos, New Mexico, at a peyote commune named Morning Star. Before you were born, you were your dad’s decision to move away from the reservation, up to northern New Mexico to learn about a Pueblo guy’s fireplace. You were the light in your parents’ eyes as they met across that fireplace in ceremony. Before you were born, your halves inside them moved to Oakland. Before you were born, before your body was much more than heart, spine, bone, brain, skin, blood, and vein, when you’d just started to build muscle with movement, before you showed, bulged in her belly, as her belly, before your dad’s pride could belly-swell from the sight of you, your parents were in a room listening to the sound your heart made. You had an arrhythmic heartbeat. The doctor said it was normal. Your arrhythmic heart was not abnormal.

“Maybe he’s a drummer,” your dad said.
“He doesn’t even know what a drum is,” your mom said.
“Heart,” your dad said.
“The man said arrhythmic. That means no rhythm.”
“Maybe it just means he knows the rhythm so good he doesn’t always hit it when you expect him to.”

Orange, Tommy. There, There. (2018) New York: Alfred A. Knopf

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

58 participants joined us from all over the country and even the world: from San Francisco to NYC, from Canada to Texas,  from Seattle to West Virginia, and even as far as Greece!

The text we read together was Days by Philip Larkin. In reading the poem out loud more than once, we noticed how we paid attention to different parts of the poem in virtue of our readers’ different voices and expressivity. In our discussion, we pointed to the ways in which time and space converge in the text, aided by the author’s stylistic choices (even just beginning from the punctuation!). We reflected on the ways in which “the days are where we live”, particularly from the perspective of the multitude of roles and identities we each brought into our space. 

After 20 minutes of discussion, we wrote to the prompt “Write about the day that brought you here”. We were amazed at the talent and beauty we heard in the writings shared, each offering insight into the variety of paths that make our community such a rich space. We discussed the presence of time in our responses to the piece: in the recognition of the “precariousness of each precious day” or in the “weight of the variety of responsibilities” accompanying our journeys to the present.

Participants are warmly encouraged to share what you wrote below, to keep the conversation going here, bearing in mind that the blog of course is a public space where confidentiality is not assured.

Please join us for our next session: Sunday April 5th at 12pm EST, with more times to be announced shortly.

AND PLEASE NOTE: in an effort to make these sessions more secure, starting next week we will be having individualized registration for these sessions which will be accessed from the Live Virtual Sessions page of the blog.

We look forward to seeing you again soon!

Days
BY PHILIP LARKIN

What are days for?
Days are where we live.   
They come, they wake us   
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:   
Where can we live but days?

Ah, solving that question
Brings the priest and the doctor   
In their long coats
Running over the fields.

Philip Larkin, "Days " from Whitsun Weddings. Copyright © Estate of Philip Larkin.  Reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber, Ltd.

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

Forty-nine people from around the world (Bahrain, United Kingdom, Qatar, other places typed into the chat?) gathered for an hour in Narrative Medicine’s Zoom Room to read the prologue to Planet of the Blind, Stephen Kuusito’s memoir of living with retinopathy, the result of his being placed in an over- oxygenated incubator soon after his premature birth.   

In the prologue (text posted below), readers meet Kuusito  with his dog Corky navigating Grand Central Station “a temple for Hermes…with no idea …how to find our train.” One Zoom participant responded to the renderings of a man, who is able to see “colors and shapes that seem windblown” and guides the sighted with words and images of “hemlock darknesses and sudden pools of rose-colored electric light.” A close reader drew our attention to a single word in the sentence, “There is something about us…” and considered the possible use of “about” to reference subjects (in this case a man and his dog) or to point to what surrounds or is “about” them. Another participant noticed the many images, which the narrator conjured from nature: not only animals and hemlocks but also a gibbous moon as he walks through the vaulted railway station. One person liked that he invoked his dog’s name four times. Another mentioned the narrator’s reference to himself and Corky as two slow moving sea lions. She noted that those creatures are awkward on land but, in their element, are graceful and strong. For one reader this text evoked another text. She drew a parallel between Virgil guiding Dante and the railway employee offering to guide the memoirist.

On Zoom we had two senses: vision and hearing, yet, guided in words through the scene, we were able to feel “a breeze from Jerusalem” and a gentle touch when Kuusito decides to trust a stranger, take his elbow, and welcome readers “to the planet of the blind.”

After twenty minutes of discussion, we wrote to the prompt: “Write about your planet.”

Before inviting people to read, the facilitators asked people to respond to each other’s work as they had to the published work, not interviewing the writer or asking more of a piece than what it can furnish in four minutes of writing.

Three people read aloud and a dozen responded to their renderings of “our”planet (as one person wrote) with children playing and flowers blooming; a grocery store aisle where the narrator is afraid of the virus and afraid to talk to another shopper; and a backyard with deer and giant birds (related to dinosaurs), a planet preserved for wildlife.  

Participants are warmly encouraged to share what you wrote below, to keep the conversation going here, bearing in mind that the blog of course is a public space where confidentiality is not assured.

Please join us for our next session: Friday April 3rd at 6pm EST, with more times to be announced shortly.

As before, due to the wonderful turnout for these sessions, we encourage you to join as promptly as possible: After a ten minute grace period, we will be closing the Zoom session to preserve the integrity of the session for those joined. If you try to join past that time and are unable, we encourage you to join the next session! More times and opportunities will be announced soon.

We look forward to seeing you again soon!

I’ve entered Grand Central Station with guide dog Corky, my yellow Labrador. We stand uncertain, man   and dog collecting our wits while thousands of five o’clock commuters jostle around us. Beside them,   Corky and I are in slow motion, like two sea lions. We’ve suddenly found ourselves in the ocean, and   here in this railway terminal, where pickpockets and knife artists roam the crowds, we’re moving in a   different tempo. There is something about us, the perfect poise of the dog, the uprightness of the man, I   don’t know, a spirit maybe, fresh as the gibbous moon, the moon we’ve waited for, the one with the new  light.

So this is our railway station, a temple for Hermes. We wash through the immense vault with   no idea about how to find our train or the information kiosk. And just now it doesn’t matter. None of the   turmoil or anxiety of being lost will reach us because moving is holy, the very motion is a breeze from Jerusalem.

 This blindness of mine still allows me to see colors and shapes that seem windblown; the great   terminal is supremely lovely in its swaying hemlock darknesses and sudden pools of rose-colored electric   light. We don’t know where we are, and though the world is dangerous, it’s also haunting in its beauty.   Even to a lost man with a speck of something like seeing, this minute here, just standing, taking in the air   as a living circus, this is what tears of joy are for.

 A railway employee has offered to guide me to my train. I hold his elbow gently, Corky heeling   beside us, and we descend through the tunnels under the building. I’ve decided to trust a stranger.

 Welcome to the planet of the blind.      

Kuusito, Stephen. Planet of the Blind (1998) New York: Dial Press.

It was wonderful to meet with last night’s group for our second live session, coming together from around the globe –from Brooklyn to San Francisco, Canada to Qatar. We were profoundly uplifted to see so many people share in this experience. The responses, spoken and written, were unforgettable.

The poem we read together was “Wait” by Galway Kinnell, posted below.  It helped us think about how very strange time has become under the conditions of pandemic, and about trust, and where it can be nurtured, “Distrust everything, if you have to./But trust the hours.”   Recognizing how weary many of us feel at this moment, the poem also opened the topic of fatigue, “You’re tired. But everyone’s tired./But no one is tired enough.”  And very powerful recollections were stirred by the imagery of “second-hand gloves,” “their memories are what give them the need for other hands.”

Our prompt was: “Write about a recent time when you trusted the hours.”  The writing produced and read aloud was rich with imagery and emotion, and our participants listened attentively and showed great appreciation and empathy for one another.  One particular piece drew our attention to the elements of time and hope in our processing of loss.

Participants are warmly encouraged to share what you wrote below, to keep the conversation going, bearing in mind that the blog of course is a public space where confidentiality is not assured.

Please join us for our next session: Wednesday April 1^st at 7pm EST, with more times to be announced shortly.

As before, due to the wonderful turnout for these sessions, we encourage you to join as promptly as possible: After a ten minute grace period, we will be closing the Zoom session to preserve the integrity of the session for those joined. If you try to join past that time and are unable, we encourage you to join the next session! More times and opportunities will be announced soon.

We look forward to seeing you again soon!

Wait
Copyright © 1980 by Galway Kinnell. From Mortal Acts, Mortal Words (Mariner Books, 1980).

Wait, for now.
Distrust everything, if you have to.
But trust the hours.  Haven’t they
carried you everywhere, up to now?
Personal events will become interesting again.
Hair will become interesting.
Pain will become interesting.
Buds that open out of season will become lovely again.
Second-hand gloves will become lovely again,
their memories are what give them
the need for other hands.  And the desolation
of lovers is the same: the enormous emptiness
carved out of such tiny beings as we are
asks to be filled; the need
for the new love is faithfulness to the old.

Wait.
Don’t go too early.
You’re tired.  But everyone’s tired.
But no one is tired enough.
Only wait a while and listen.
Music of hair,
Music of pain,
music of looms weaving all our loves again.
Be there to hear it, it will be the only time,
most of all to hear,
the flute of your whole existence,
rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion.

Thank you SO MUCH to all who joined us for our first virtual group session!! We had 66 people on the zoom meeting — there were folks from New York and New Jersey but also from Texas, North Carolina, California, Georgia, Alabama, and other countries all over the world — China, Morocco, Argentina, Greece, Brazil, the UK, Poland, and more! Wow. What an incredible thing, to get to come together and feel the collective energy in that virtual space.

The poem that we read together was “Wild Geese,” by Mary Oliver. We spoke about how the poem seems to juxtapose the idea and feeling of loneliness with the concept of the “the family of things,” and how it offers different ideas of intimacy with “the soft animal of your body” and “the world offers itself to your imagination.”

The prompt we wrote to was: “Meanwhile, the world goes on.” We were only able to hear three pieces, but what we heard was incredible — each piece speaking to our current moment, and each piece full of hope. One response, written as a poem, was unfinished due the time constraint for the writing, and it was observed how this was representative of our current moment — we are constructing a response to this global situation, but are not yet finished.

Please, those of you who were on the call with us, we encourage you to share your work with us in the comments below, and to respond to one another there and keep up the conversation. The full text of the poem is below, and please join us for one of our next sessions: Tuesday March 31^st at 7pm EST and Wednesday April 1^st at 7pm EST, with more times to be announced soon.

Again, due to the wonderful turnout for this first session, we encourage you to join as promptly as possible: After a ten minute grace period, we will be closing the Zoom session to preserve the integrity of the session for those joined. If you try to join past that time and are unable, we encourage you to join the next session! More times and opportunities will be announced soon.

We look forward to seeing you all with us again!

Wild Geese, by Mary Oliver Originally published in “Dream Work” by Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986. You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting – over and over announcing your place in the family of things.