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A Dialogue or Conversation Poem: A Prompt for Writing and Healing
In a classic dialogue poem, as I understand it, you create two characters and they carry on a conversation—in poetry. A variation on this theme—a conversation poem?—is a writing idea I’ve shared with my students. I’ve been thinking for a while now that this existed somewhere in the world, and it probably does, but then again it’s possible I may have made it up. In any case, the way I’m thinking about a conversation poem is you actually write your lines between the poet’s lines—in a conversation. I think...
Drawing a Map
When I talk about drawing a map, I’m talking about picturing a kind of path between where you are now and where you want to be. One can make a one-year map. A five-year. A one-month. I also think it’s helpful to picture as a goal something that’s within the realm of the possible. If everything were to go as well as it possibly could, where would you want to be in X amount of time? Then all you have to do is draw it. It’s one of those...
826 Valencia
I believe in the power of writing. I believe magical things can happen when spaces are provided for people to write, and to be nurtured in that writing. I believe something especially powerful can happen when these spaces are provided for young people. And say that you could have a pirate store at the entrance to such a place, a store that sells eye patches and peg legs and vials of “Scurvy Begone”? A place where young people could have fun while they were finding their writing voice. Might...
Writing and Healing on the Radio
Last month I had the good fortune to get an invitation from Anne Hallward, a psychiatrist in Portland, Maine, who hosts a weekly show called Safe Space Radio. She was doing a series on writing and healing and invited me to participate in a phone interview with her. The show aired last week and is now available: Writing and Healing on the Radio I have to admit—I was initially wary of listening to it. It’s not as if I didn’t feel the interview had gone well. Anne has a...
Like a Desert Flower
Because this month I am featuring Sakeena Yacoobi’s work at the Afghan Institute for Learning, I went looking for a poem out of Afghanistan. I was delighted to find this one, “Like a Desert Flower,” by Parween Faiz Zadah Malaal, a former journalist and popular woman poet, who lives and writes in the Pashto region of Afghanistan. Like a desert flower waiting for rain, like a river-bank thirsting for the touch of pitchers, like the dawn longing for light; and like a house, like a house in ruins...
The Blue Cotton Gown: A Midwife’s Memoir by Patricia Harman
Oh, I do love this book. Reading it has been like coming across a lovely song—a voice—that I didn’t know existed. A surprise on a late summer day. This summer I took several crates of books to the used bookstore to trade for credit. Much of my credit I’m saving for when students start putting in their requests off my booklist, but while I was there the other week I idled through the shelves and came across this memoir by midwife and nurse practitioner Patricia Harman. I opened to...