This past week I had the immense pleasure of attending a workshop at Goddard College facilitated by Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg. The workshop was called “Seven Poets to Change Your Life.” Caryn herself is a poet who has changed my life, so I had high expectations. They were more than met. The first poem Caryn shared was…
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I have a theory that from the age of 9 to 25 we try to change who we are and then the rest of our lives we try to return to who we were when we were 9. Before we really gave a shit what other people thought, before we knew we were weird, before…
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Here in this deep chill, a dear friend came over with dinner from my favorite Italian place. Because I wanted to be served but did not want to go out. Because I wanted him to write. Some people play scrabble or watch movies with their friends, some people make their friends write after dinner. Well,…
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“All art is autobiographical; a pearl is the oyster’s autobiography.” –Federico Fellini I love this on multiple levels. Let’s accept that through art-making we are trying to figure ourselves out. Our stories, our context, our feelings. When we put our work into the world, we are asserting our individual importance. Let’s confess that we…
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There was a lot of talk of diarrhea in the past week. That is not at all what I’m referencing when I say exploding truth. Wait, what’s that? That’s not where your head went? Oh, right. Mine either… This morning I came across this, from Adrienne Rich’s essay Vesuvius at Home: It is always what…
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Happy New Year, beauties. Sitting with questions is mad uncomfortable. I’ve been thinking a lot about questions, and the importance of narrowing them down, honing in on what they are. Because the answers are almost always contained within the question. And if you’re asking the wrong–or a dishonest or too large–question, you’re likely to…
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In my own writing and reading I’ve recently been interested in the mythologizing of personal stories: enlarging metaphors and themes to blend truth and existing folklore with newly created heroes and villains. It seems that sometimes, the only way to get at a story so big you can’t see the whole thing is to write…
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I heard this beautiful poem by David Allen Sullivan on the Writer’s Almanac the other week. It is everything to grant oneself permission aloud, even if temporarily–to not be your absolute model best self at every turn. Shake off the burden of the unnecessary, of what you can release that will cause no one else…
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This is kind of weird. I don’t remember starting this post or choosing this picture or what the title meant–“Many Cups to Drink From” but I must have done it in the past week. It was here in my drafts and I feel compelled to continue it in some way. Perhaps we’ll look at…
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