I began keeping prompts here when I was teaching writing weekly in the Intensive Outpatient Psych programs at Walter Reed and Ft Belvoir*. Each week I’d write a post with a poem I’d been thinking about, so that people who I’d met in those programs but had completed treatment and left the DC area could…
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(repost from CBAW Newsletter) Beloved community, It is a difficult time. Most of us are in our safe homes, opening the news apps, social media, and email newsletters, sick at the images, wrecked by the stories. Some of us are reading each message to identify and decode the wrong things said, to identify evidence of…
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In January I was approached by Kayleigh Greenwell-Bryant of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center with the opportunity to serve as the 2023 Pauli Murray Art for Racial Justice Fellow. The position comes with studio space at STABLEarts, and a performance and exhibition space at Eaton DC. The catch? I have to assemble a performance and exhibition in a…
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The very first Combat Paper/Warrior Writers post-workshop performance and exhibit of 2017 (in the DC Metro Area anyway) is coming up! Friday April 7th at 7 pm at Workhouse Arts Center in Lorton, Virginia. 9801 Ox Rd, Building W-16. I hope I see you there. (Especially you, Deeanna–we’d all love to see you!!!) In the second…
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I have been thinking lately about planting good memories. Or rather triggers for good memories. We know how it works with bad memories–certain smells or sounds or little gestures appear and transport us to some terrible thing for a moment. And often it takes a lot of our energy to recover. But I’ve been wondering about…
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A few weeks ago, the kids and I went to the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore to see the exhibit we are inside of in the picture above. It’s called King’s Mouth and it’s this big foamy cave you climb into and lay down inside and above you there’s a convex mirror encircled with lighted…
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It’s been a while. I’m sorry. This week, Mary Karr’s brilliant book about memoir, “The Art of Memoir” landed in my hands. Want to know how it landed in my hands? I bought it. My own damn self. Because I thought it would help me with some writing I’m struggling with. And it did. Because…
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I have been trying to write this poem for at least a year. Last week, after the loss of a particularly beautiful soul, it began to tap on the inside of my skull with urgency. It’s all I have for you right now. I’ll be back with more soon. Stay safe. May you have both…
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It starts: Every morning she tripped over the rug. Every morning. Then she got dressed, drank coffee brushed her teeth–did all the things a person is expected to do every morning. I point the rug out to you reader, because it seems to say something particular. Only a particular sort of person would not remove…
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For a while, this interview sort of embarrassed me–because my life has changed so much since then, and I sound so certain. But re-reading it, I realize that only the last part–dancing with my husband–is no longer a part of my life. And I feel like the woman who was emerging at that time was…
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