Weekly Wide-Awake #57

[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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Dear Sugar. Graduation. Wide-Awakeness.

The future has an ancient heart. — Carlo Levi

Cheryl Strayed’s tiny beautiful things: Advice on love and life from Dear Sugar fell into my hands at a bookstore years ago. tiny beautiful things is a collection of letters from Strayed’s advice column, Dear Sugar. I had just moved to a different part of the country. I knew no one. I had left my job. Boxes were piled in our apartment. I wanted books. I wanted friends, and books have always been friends. tiny beautiful things appeared.

In opening her letter, The Future Has An Ancient Heart, Strayed explains:

There’s a line by the Italian writer Carlo Levi that I think is apt here: “The future has an ancient heart.” I love it because it expresses with such grace and economy what is certainly true—that who we become is born of who we most primitively are; that we both know and cannot possibly know what it is we’ve yet to make manifest in our lives. I think it’s a useful sentiment for you to reflect upon now, sweet peas, at this moment when the future likely feels the opposite of ancient, when instead it feels like a Lamborghini that’s pulled up to the curb while every voice around demands you get in and drive.

I revisit tiny beautiful things as I often as I can, especially when I feel lonely and afraid. I love the letter from a university Creative Writing teacher requesting Sugar (Strayed) write a commencement address/letter to her mostly-English-major students. She had read Sugar letters to her class before, and thought Sugar could speak wisely to their existential angst and fear. Sugar opens her letter with the Levi quote above. She goes on to explain life’s balance between knowing and confusion, curves and straight lines, and love and work. This letter and response speak to me deeply as an English major, writer, and traveler on this earth of expectations and uncertainty. I think it also speaks to our quest for love and meaning, that is bigger than graduations and is perhaps is the essence of birth and death and beginning and ending.

“And you are going to be all right not because you majored in English or didn’t and not because your plan is to apply to law school or don’t, but because all right is almost always where we eventually land, even if we fuck up entirely along the way.”

It is always reassuring to hear you are going to be all right. In the midst of change. You are going to be all right. When you make mistakes. You are going to be all right. When the margin for error feels painfully narrow. You are going to be all right. You you forget the steel and substance of which you are made. You are going to be all right. In times of intense chaos and change. You are going to be all right. When you fuck up entirely. You are going to be all right.

“You have to do what you have to do. … Or just close your eyes and remember everything you already know. Let whatever mysterious starlight that guided you this far guide you onward into whatever crazy beauty awaits.”

I believe in the mysterious starlight. Once we recall the mysterious starlight’s wisdom — wisdom born of knowing and becoming – we can hold the experience – good or bad – close and allow the past to be the path to crazy beauty. Doing what we have to do is not up for debate on our path to crazy beauty. We simply do it. Forgetting what we already know does not happen on our path to crazy beauty. We simply remember. As a writer, I believe words are a mysterious starlight guide. Living, and then reflecting through writing, is my path to crazy beauty.

“I hope that when people ask what you’re going to do with your English and/or creative writing degree you’ll say: Continue my bookish examination of the contradictions and complexities of human motivation and desire; or maybe just: Carry it with me as I do everything that matters.”

When I was searching for a subject for my doctoral dissertation, trying to figure out what I just could not live without studying and writing about, my dissertation chair asked me, “What books do you schlep around?” I had been schlepping around books by philosopher Maxine Greene in blistering Texas heat for years at that point. Her work included the concept of wide-awakeness. Much to the dismay of my doctoral exam committee, who tried to point me toward studying standardized testing as a pragmatic path toward a solid academic career, I chose to study wide-awakeness. I still continue my bookish examination of the contradictions and the complexities of human motivation and desire and everything that matters.

Living the Comma #30

Graduation Season. Commencement. Famous Speeches.

I’d say, as a goal in life, you could do worse than: Try to be kinder. — George Saunders, Commencement Address, Syracuse University, 2013

Dear Writer Friends,

This is graduation season. A season of taking stock and saying thank you. A season of remembering those who have supported us and celebrating where we have been, are, and will be. A season of finishes and starts. A season big enough to include everyone — whether we are walking across a stage or not — in a collective past, present, and future.

I want to say a little bit about the word “commencement.” It sits in a liminal space between the I am and the Not yet. That is why it is so powerful. That is the big enoughness. Let me explain. Life is a series of beginnings and endings — of falling aparts and back togethers, if you will. A quick review of the etymology of commencement reveals when students finished their course of study and graduated, they celebrated their graduation by eating together —faculty, alumni, and graduates — at large common tables, called commensa in the Latin of the time. (Commensa becomes Commencement.) Graduation as a time for experts and newly-minted scholars, teachers and students, individuals and communities, and families and friends to come to the table together in acknowledgement and celebration makes sense. Commencement is a profound act of bounty and generosity and kindness under this lens.

As writer’s, we use words to mark time and construct narratives and leave a record. We use words to tell stories that capture lives and wisdom and worlds. We use words to communicate in ways that ancient cave writing foretold when symbols became words. We use words so that generation after generation can leave our world better than we found it.

Read entire post here.

MONDAYS ARE FREE EXERCISES 226-230

Red. Secrets. Obligation. Redaction. Reach.

EXERCISE 227: FIVE VARIATIONS FROM A THIEF

steal your favorite line

What is one of your favorite lines of poetry from one of your favorite poets?/ Write a non-rhyming poem made of five-line stanzas (aka a cinquain!). It should have five stanzas in all (5 lines x 5 stanzas = 25 lines)./ Steal your favorite line of poetry and use it five times in this poem, once in each cinquain. Also, don’t let the stolen line appear in the same stanzaic location twice. For example, it can’t be the third line of a cinquain more than once./ Lastly! In your poem, thank the poet from whom you stole the line.

here is the deepest secret nobody knows/ I often feel overwhelmed/ by waking up/ by taking my first breath/ by stepping on to the soft rug// it can be too much/ here is the deepest secret nobody knows/ even the basic work/ a decision/ a heartbeat// a step/ a blink/ here is the deepest secret nobody knows/ our wounds are real/ our dreams are sacred// our fiber is elastic/ our hope is miraculous/ our faith is holy/ here is the deepest secret nobody knows/ we are steel// we are starlight/ we are root and bud/ we carry our hearts and minds/ thank you ee cummings/ here is the deepest secret nobody knows

Read the entire post here.

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