Weekly Wide-Awake #58

[The Stage is on Fire] is a page-turner in which, much like life, there are no easy answers and yet each step of the journey yields insight and hope. This work of heart must not be missed!

Melanie Faith

Creative Writing Teacher, Essayist & Poet.

Katie Steedly’s first-person piece [The Unspeakable Gift] is a riveting retelling of her participation in a National Institutes of Health study that aided her quest to come to grips with her life of living with a rare genetic disorder. Her writing is superb.

The Society of Professional Journalists

In recognition of receiving the Dateline Award for the Washingtonian Magazine essay, The Unspeakable Gift.

I thank you … It is the authenticity of your “class notes”; and it is the delicacy and skill with which you present the nuances of classroom life and the actuality of your students’ and fellow teachers’ lives.

Maxine Greene

Philosopher and Education Scholar

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Weekly Wide-Awake #58

Thirst. Offerings. Food and Wine.

Porch Swing, Summer in a Glass

Porch swing, summer in a glass./ Drinks get named for thirsts we discuss.// Discussions skirt deeper thirsts./Such thirsts burn, turn sand to mirages./ A mirage is a drink the mind mixes./In a glass marked no it pours out yes.// Yes, the sign says, this door is an entrance./At the portal, fields flower without end.// End of the road, grim terminus./We’re thirsty, we get force-fed.

Andrea Cohen

Summer is the time for deep thirst. Something about heat: we long for something. Longing agitates rest. Longing pokes life’s soft underbelly. We escape and search. We fill and empty. We dance and cry. We retreat and burst. If wintering, as Katherine May suggests, is about turning inward and allowing ourselves to reflect, tend, and heal, summering is about turning outward and allowing ourselves to pay attention, desire, and wake up. Rest, there, looks like an exhale — a laying our burden down. The claiming of our passions, the statement of our most sincere dreams, the calling into reality a deeply held “yes” is how we quench summer’s thirst.

Being thirsty is the search for “yes.” Being thirsty is the heart of hope. Being thirsty is the story we share. Being thirsty is the crack we mend with gold. Being thirsty is the light that refuses to go out. Being thirsty is the quest, the pilgrimage, the climb. Being thirsty is the as if and the not yet. Being thirsty is the why and the I am. Being thirsty is the root and the bud.

Living the Comma #31

Offerings. Pentecost. Kate Bowler.

For every book, both as a historian and as a person trying to find their way in the world, I mostly think about my writing in terms of trying to dismantle a cultural myth. Everything Happens for a Reason was about why bad things happen to good people. No Cure for Being Human was about why wellness will feel so attractive and so incomplete. And [Joyful, Anyway] is about what we should be wanting when people talk about their best life now. I know the prosperity gospel version: God wants you to be happy, healthy, wealthy, and that you should be able to achieve that with your positive words and actions. But I felt, given how lightly apocalyptic this moment is, that it requires that we dig out something not just hard, but something beautiful for ourselves. What actually is the loveliest thing that we can offer each other? — Kate Bowler

Dear Writer Friends,

I have read Kate Bowler’s work for years. Bowler always asks thought provoking questions while being seriously funny. I absolutely love Bowler’s question at the end of this quote. “What actually is the loveliest thing that we can offer each other?” As writer’s, we laugh, investigate, create, cry, remember, forgive, make sense, jostle, construct, deconstruct, imagine, reimagine, grieve, heal, peel, tear, repair, console, confront, lift, hold, and a hundred other things with words.

We offer all that to each other when we write.

Let’s tie the idea of an offering to Pentecost. Let me explain. Sunday was Pentecost — the day in which the Christian Church celebrates the Holy Spirit descending and the Christian Church beginning. Consider the idea that our words are the continued gift of the Holy Spirit. Our offerings are Holy. Our words are Holy, and Holy is big enough to hold us all. Like Love itself. They allow us to feel beauty. They allow us to connect with one another and our world. They allow us to pay attention to what matters.

It is about building a permission structure to thrive in lightly apocalyptic times. It is about knowing we often find what we seek. It is about, as Ross Gay encourages, discovering what we love in common. It is about, as Katie Ferris suggests, learning to write love letters in a burning world. It is about seeing how the puzzle pieces of a writing life fit — borders and edges, ones with 100 colors, before we see the picture on the box emerge.

Read entire post here.

Spit and Spaghetti #20

Pitches from Wind and Wall

Food and Wine — Writer, Equipment Reviews Section

an excerpt from my pitch

I want to write for Food and Wine because I am a foodie who has hosted a monthly Supper Club for years, an HGTV connoisseur who takes copious notes on kitchen remodels, and a lover of making the food I grew up with for friends and family. I am a researcher who has made a career of peering under the hood of organizations, policies, classrooms, and curricula to figure out what works. I am an artist who sees food — and the making and sharing of beautiful meals — as something that just might save the world.

Read entire post here.

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