Living the Comma #14

[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

Enter your email here to receive Weekly Wide-Awake

back

Sunshine. Memory. Seasons.

Even trained for years as they all had been in precision of language, what words could you use which would give another the experience of sunshine? — Lois Lowry, The Giver

Dear Writer Friends,

This month’s Virginia Highland Church Banned Book Club pick was Lois Lowry’s The Giver. The story’s young protagonist, Jonas, is given the important Receiver of Memory role in his community. In thinking about stories, memories, and words, writing gives form to our past, present, and future. Words — even the most precise language — may never capture the experience of sunshine, but as memory’s container, as interlocutor between what was and what is and what will be, their value is immeasurable. That is the power of telling our stories to one another and writing our stories down. Coming together to remember and share our stories invites us to understand, notice, and fully live.

Our next face-to-face writing session will be this Sunday, February 1st, at VHC after snack time. We are scheduled to meet from 12:15 to 1:30 in March, April, and May, too. To virtually connect with the group during our meetings, use this link — https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85095318186.

This week, as a memory-writing exercise, select a prompt from Lucy Ives’ “Ten Writing Prompts” from The Paris Review. In her Wired essay, “In a Perpetual Present” Erica Hayasaki discusses a life without memories. Award-winning writer Jaqueline Woodson reflects in Last Summer with Maizon,

I wouldn’t mind the early autumn/ if you came home today/ I’d tell you how much I miss you/ and know I’d be okay./ It’s funny how we never know/ exactly how our life will go/ It’s funny how a dream can fade/ with the break of day.// Time can’t erase the memory/ and time can’t bring you home/ Last Summer was a part of me/ and now a part is gone.

Woodson writes memory as poetic and gentle and complex. She is one of my absolute favorite writers. Learn more about Woodson in a Design Matters podcast, Discovering my love of words, and/or in her TED talk, “What reading slowly taught me about writing.”

Living the comma is about memory and words and imagination. Living the comma is about story and breath and healing. Living the comma is about looking closely and slowly and deeply at our yesterdays and todays and tomorrows.

From the heart of the comma.

Katie

Thank you for Living the Comma with me. This community is truly love and light. Subscribe to the Wide-Awakeness Project and share your light. It has never been more important.