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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This past weekend I directed an amazing performance by with caregivers of severely wounded warriors from WWP’s Independence Program. I crafted the script from their words, written in four weeks of virtual writing workshops and prompts. It was one of the more challenging collaborative performance projects I’ve undertaken this way (and I think by now I’ve done dozens), because after spending time with the writing they sent, I had the sense that instead of a poem that wanders, the performance should have a very clear narrative structure. I should say–I had two weeks from receiving their words to writing the script. They had 24 hours from seeing the script to performing it on stage. During these past two weeks, it was always in the back of my mind. I printed out their writing and carried the thick stack of pages with me everywhere. I put big paper up on my office wall and mapped out the arc. And then it rushed up, rushed past. And then afterward, on Sunday morning, I woke up and it was over.
When we tell a story about our past selves, we are in fact telling a story about another person. And we, the one telling it, are quite different than that person.
I have been thinking a lot about the rhythms of place.
Where I live, where I have lived for most of my life, regardless of what country I’ve lived in, is in the suburbs, the orderly suburbs, where things are mostly the same day over day. We park in our own driveways, in the paved sea of white hatched spaces that surround every building, in our assigned places. I swing wide and park my big car haphazardly, pull through so I’m facing out if I have the chance. I grew up this way: in suburb after suburb. High speed roads with raised sidewalks.
Last week I went for this little loping jog on the beach, just chugged along as close to the surf as possible, near the packed sand, but the tide was coming in and my sneaker got soaked so I moved up further to where the sand was dry and my feet were sinking and my gait was graceless. This was on Memorial Day and the beach was a bit crowded and as I clumsily loped past a pair of young men, they kind of pointed and clapped, which at first I was embarrassed by but then I shouted to them “This is so hard!!!” And they cheered some more and said “We love you!!! You can do it!” let’s do the work, even when it’s clumsy and graceless and wouldn’t be objectively impressive to anyone else. Cheering for you. I love you. You can do it.
CBAW had our Memorial Day observation reading yesterday. Ten veterans/service members, many of whom I met during very very difficult times in their lives, came together to perform and hold space for the particular grief that is especially tied to the camaraderie of military service. During the month of May CBAW’s visual art programs were dedicated to a collaborative art project of remembrance for Memorial Day. Designed by Joe Merritt and Ashy Palliparambil and assembled and marketed by CBAW’s own Rob Haney, nineteen artists contributed tiles. You can buy a print here.
The poem is not about what you saw, but about who is seeing it.
From The Wild Unknown Archetypes Guidebook by Kim Kearns:
“We often think that The Shadow can be purified, illuminated, and made right through effort and achievement. However, it is typically the case that our lofty pursuit of ascension and perfection is the very source material of the shadow itself.”
