Living the Comma #19

[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

Gratitude. Aliveness. Books. Brother David Steindl-Rast. Oldster.

Everything is a gift. The degree to which we are awake to this truth is a measure of our gratefullness, and gratefullness is a measure of our aliveness.― Brother David Steindl-Rast

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you VHC Writing Group. What a wonderful gathering yesterday. I am profoundly grateful. Our writing group is a measure of our aliveness. As the buds burst on the trees, aliveness is all around. As I note “40 Days of Good Shit” as part of Nadia Bolz-Weber’s Lenten thought exercise, aliveness is all around. As young adult artists embrace our church and encourage a dialogue about love, aliveness is all around. Gratitude for everything is aliveness — paying attention, truth telling, and deep connection. It is the elemental understanding of oneness, interdependence, and complexity. It is the alchemy of joy, sorrow, and healing.

Our next in person writing session will be April 13 (to accommodate Easter, which is April 5th) at VHC after snack time.

We are scheduled to meet from 12:15 to 1:30 in May, too. To virtually connect with the group during our meetings, use this link — https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85095318186.

Join our Weekly Writer’s Call on Thursday. Happening every Thursday from 1-2, each call will be an hour of silently and virtually writing together. Whatever project you choose to work on. Whenever you want to join in. Between the cracks of our busy days. Join our effort to write together. Here is the link for this Thursday.

This newsletter — Living the Comma — is delivered weekly to keep our broader community up-to-date and writing. If you know other’s who might want to be involved, please share word of our group, the newsletter, and the virtual link.

I have been following Sari Botton’s Oldster Magazine since my early days on Substack. Botton states, Oldster is about, “what it means to travel through time in a human body— at every phase of life.” Check out Botton’s interview with John Irving, “On his latest novel, “Queen Esther,” and his approach to writing. Plus, his Oldster Magazine Questionnaire.” The Oldster Magazine Questionnaire is an interesting writing exercise. The Oldster Magazine interview questions appear at the end of the Irving interview.

Several my favorite writers have new books — Kate Bowler, Joyful Anyway, Kaitlin Kurtis, Everything is a Story, Rachel Held Evans and Sarah Bessey, Braving the Truth: Essential Essays for Reckoning with and Reimagining Faith, and Neal Allen and Anne Lamott, Good Writing. It is an exciting time to be a writer who loves to read.

To find out more about David Steindl-Rast, explore his work on Grateful Living, listen to the On Being podcast, How to Be Grateful in Every Moment (But Not for Everything), and watch his TED talk, “Want to be Happy? Be Grateful.”

From the heart of the comma,

Katie

Enter your email here to receive Weekly Wide-Awake