Weekly Wide-Awake #43

[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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Summer of Love. Objects. Resistance. Teddy Bears.

Summer of Soul

Resistance here doesn’t mean revolution. It doesn’t mean storming the barricades. Resistance means using art for the things that it does best, which is to create human portraits and communicate ideas and forge a climate where people of different races or classes are known to you because they make themselves known. In the simplest terms, art humanizes. It opens the circuit of empathy. And once that process happens, it’s that much harder to think of people as part of a policy or a statistic. Art reverses the alienation that can creep into society. — Questlove

In winter, I want to think of the Summer of Soul. I want to think about the connection between art and freedom, between empathy and freedom, between love and freedom. I don’t feel free in my country right now.

I find solace in the thought that art humanizes. I write because I have no choice. My hand shakes. I still write. Through writing, I make my voice heard. I join a chorus of artists who make themselves known and soften hearts and open spaces that isolation, alienation, and cruelty destroy. I have always felt safe singing in a chorus. I have always felt safe writing in my journal. I have always felt safe surrounded in the creativity and love of others. Peace, justice, and love are big ideas, and art is big enough for all that and more.

As I think about freedom, I want look forward. I want to pay attention to the beauty and pain of the past, look honestly at our present situation, and create a future where the as if, not yet, and why not dance. A future better than any past we have ever known — worthy of generations.

I want to say a few words about the Summer of Soul, the movie directed by Quest Love chronicling the Harlem Cultural Festival of 1969. It is a must watch! I watched the film for the first time in the summer of 2021 with my parents. Watching it with them opened a conversation about what the country was like then. They were college students involved in student life and the Civil Rights Movement. I learned that around the summer of 1969, Mom and Dad hosted dinner for the Fifth Dimension at their apartment. Listening to music and stories from 1969 reminds me of the struggle of it all: that not-so-distant history holds cruelty and injustice right next to soul and beauty. We learn about 1619 and Juneteenth and learn our history. We learn about the Trail of Tears. We learn about Stonewall. It is the story of our nation. We understand wounds run deep and scar tissue remains. If the arts humanize, then the music of the Harlem Cultural Festival makes us a little more human. Our story, explicitly telling the truth about our story through the arts, has never been more critical.

MONDAYS ARE FREE EXERCISES 171 — 175

Empathy. Quilt. Prom. Kaleidoscope.

EXERCISE 175: A PLANTING DAY

everything that grows

Plant one of the objects from Tuesday’s or Thursday’s prompt in a field. (Yes, you can plant a piano or a church or a seed or a hat.) Describe everything that grows from it.

Planting A Kaleidoscope

Planting a kaleidoscope is building a new world. Broken mirrors reflect that beauty of seeing sideways and upside down and backwards and inside out as seed becomes stem becomes blossom. Imagine the beauty of a kaleidoscope blossom. Colorful patterns reveal a new truth from turning soil. Imagine the sustenance of new truth. I shut my eyes and taste new truth. The sound a kaleidoscope makes as it reflects and refracts and grows is of the angels, a chorus of harmony and dissonance so perfect we will only hear it in heaven.

Read the entire post here.

Spit and Spaghetti #9

Pitches from Wind and Wall

Creativity and Resistance — Ellipsus

Creativity has never been more important. A few years ago, I taught a writing class focused on gratitude at a men’s federal prison. It was then I began to understand the power of our words to lift each other up, share our common humanity, imagine an even better as if, and create our world together. This article will be a 1000-word exploration of creativity at this moment. It will define resistance as a creative act. It will respond to the question, “What is the artist’s role right now?”

Read the entire post here.

Living the Comma #15

Thursday Writer’s Hour. Teddy Bears. The Moth. Roxanne Gay.

It’s February and we are all in the middle of so much. Writing can help us sort through the mess. Writing can help us find strength and clarity. Writing can help us, as Rilke suggests, live the questions. Writing our stories is living the questions. A writing group member and friend suggested I check out prompts from The Moth

The Moth is true stories, told live and without notes. We celebrate the ability of true, personal storytelling to illuminate both the diversity and commonality of human experience… Through live and virtual shows, storytelling workshops, a podcast, Peabody Award-winning Radio Hour, and New York Times Best Selling books, The Moth brings the power of personal storytelling to millions of people each year—creating community and building empathy around the world.

Select a Moth prompt and explore your story. Here is a collection of Moth stories that celebrate Black History month to give you an idea of their work. In thinking about writing advice right now, check out Roxane Gay’s Masterclass, Writing for Social Change. For brief writing tips on finding the why, listen to Gay’s 5-minute New York Times video. For even more Gay, read the full text of Gay’s speech, “Tired of Talking about Diversity.”

Read entire post here.

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