Blog

Breaking it Apart to Prove it’s Whole

I’ve been thinking a lot about measurement and proving, and just spent a few days receiving a great deal of data. I am working with an incredible, capable team to develop ways to measure the benefits of our creative writing workshops, but I also feel really, really, really certain that breaking it apart and looking…
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Coincidence

Things I’m obsessed with: This Life by Vampire Weekend (I’ve listened to it probably 150 times), 44+ (give or take) people I met at the Bush Institute last week, and Joy Harjo being the Poet Laureate the United States of America needs. Boston Boston Boston! Brandon Melendez, Amelia Bane, and I are coming to read…
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Talking About Trees

Dearest friends, I’ve got a fundraising campaign going for the next month–CBAW is trying to match a foundation grant. If you can help us out, or know someone who can, please consider passing the information along. Here’s a link to the campaign. With the help of the community, we can bring art, music, improv, and…
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This Week

This week I got my hair cut and got news of a suicide and news of a murder and cried in the car and drove over a bridge with my mother and son and read a poem in the state capital and stood in a circle of magnolia trees on the verge of blooming and…
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When Shall We Tell the Children?

Next Thursday at 6:30 pm, please join me IN PERSON for a writing workshop at the beautiful Strathmore Mansion. Tickets are available here. Today is the last day of national poetry month and I’m doing it up big. In the morning I went to a middle school to meet 12 children (a few quite skeptical)…
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What if you knew?

I don’t usually watch serious movies (some people might say that I don’t usually watch good movies, but those people are rude) because I have a hard time with them. I cry a lot, I get confused (a confession reader, please don’t be an asshole). The confusion stems from the fact that I have a hard time watching closely, because half my brain is always somewhere else, thinking about productivity, thinking about the book I should be reading or the email I should be responding to.

Drinking Water & Paying Attention

First, some business. If you’re in NYC, I’d like to see you tomorrow at 7 pm at McNally Jackson in Williamsburg. It is going to be so much fun and I think you like fun. Am I wrong? Don’t you like fun? Here’s a link. I’ve been reading Kim Dower’s new book of poetry, Sunbathing on Tyrone Power’s Grave,…
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A Community Affair

April 6th at 5:30 pm!!! DC Area friends please please save the date. Maybe you’ll get sick of hearing about this. Maybe you already are. But if you don’t come, I want it to be because you can’t come or don’t want to come. Not because you didn’t know about it. So I’m telling you…
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What it means

If you follow me on Instagram, you may have seen the celebrity review of A Constellation of Half-Lives.* In the video, the celebrity (my mother) says, “Seema, please explain,” and reads a line of the opening poem out loud. It’s very funny, because of course, she turns the “your mother” into a question about my mother which is to…
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Settings

Last night I woke up at 2:30 am, fully fully awake. So I made a cup of tea and read for a few hours under a quilt in the lamplight in my living room. I finished reading Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession by Janet Malcolm, a slim book (that’s been made thicker by my reading, a phenomenon that…
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