The amazing Kate Gale ran workshops for us last week. She shared some poems she loves, read us some of her own incredible work and then challenged us to rewrite our own stories. Kate shared this incredible poem by Brynn Saito (linked here at Drunken Boat), and another poem by Saito. Kate’s prompt was about…
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I’m trying to memorize some of my own poems, which is an interesting and embarassing exercise. Like: not only do I think my words are so important that I have to write them down, but I also think you should read them and now–holy self-importance–I’m repeating them to myself over and over again all day…
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I’ve been having some really serious “I can’t do this” moments lately. The voice in my head has been saying, with some frequency, in the past few weeks, Why does anyone care, why do you care, why can’t you just be happy with life the way it is and stop trying to do more stuff…
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In case you haven’t noticed: I screw up. I lose my temper and I am insecure and I give up on things because I get scared and then I regret it and then I fight to get them back and then I think maybe I was right in the first place. I embarrass myself when…
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I am in Plainfield, Vermont this week (via Brattleboro, where I got to have a brief dip into the beautiful world of my sweet friends Emma and Mike). Yesterday I drove with new and old friends up and up unfamiliar roads to find the best view of the ‘Super Moon’ cresting–our same old beautiful, constant…
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The title is one of the automatic wordpress generated titles, but I think it fits. My friend Karl and I have become the sort of people who need a google calendar event to block us off to meet for dinner (puke). On Thursday, the day we had agreed upon two weeks prior, I was incredibly,…
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I say goodbye a lot. It’s one of my least favorite things to do–always has been. I moved schools a lot when I was a kid and I would avoid the active work of saying goodbye as often as possible–making jokes to diffuse the situation or skipping the last day of school. Even now, I’ll…
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This weekend began with a thunderstorm just after I returned from work. Rain fell in sheets over everything and I remembered the monsoon in Bangladesh viscerally–something flowed brighter in me. Out on my balcony, the potted Spider Lily, a descendent from my great-grandmother’s garden in Dhaka stood against the rail, unbowed against the falling water.…
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A few weeks ago, a new writing group participant asked a regular, “So basically, we just read her favorite poems and then write?” I hadn’t quite thought of it that way, but I guess it’s more or less true. It’s nice as hell being the poet in charge. There are certain pieces of writing that…
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Community is the coming together of individuals “who have learned how to communicate honestly with each other, whose relationships go deeper than their masks of composure, and who have developed some significant commitment to rejoice together, mourn together and to delight in each other and make others’ conditions our own.” If I have used this…
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