Thankful Thursday: Get A Mentor

Indexed by Jessica Hagy

 
I met my mentor in the middle of a hostage crisis.

As a SWAT team swarmed a ratty house in a forgotten field, I chatted up a colleague who would become a valuable mentor and, decades later, one of my closest friends.

Twenty years ago, she was a seasoned reporter for the state’s largest newspaper, and I was fresh from college, working as an over-eager, under-prepared reporter for a small town newspaper.

It didn’t seem right to chat and giggle in the middle of a gun-toting, armor-inducing situation, but it was a welcome relief to find an ally in the midst of this backwoods kind of crazy.

Aside from asking questions and taking notes, I didn’t know much. But I knew enough to keep my mouth shut and my eyes open. She’d worked for both small and large papers. She was smart and opinionated. She told stories of grouchy editors and wacky sources. She found life disgusting and delightful, in equal measure, and I aspired to be her.

Over the years, she nudged me toward better jobs and opportunities, and we grew into ourselves and our careers. In our own time, we each moved away from newspapers and into other media and marketing worlds. We shifted from mentor to colleagues to, ultimately, friends.

I've now known my mentor for half my life. And we now show ourselves more fully, not just the professional parts but our personal success and struggle too. We laugh a lot. We read newspapers and grumble. We drink martinis (which she taught me to enjoy: Bombay Saphire, shaken, hint of vermouth, three olives). We sigh.

Years ago when I stood in that field waiting for a man to come to his senses I had no idea I was meeting a person who would mark my life, and my heart.

Recently, I spent time with a young woman I met over a decade ago, when she was a high school student and I was a volunteer for a teen writing group. We’ve kept in touch over the years, through her first job, her first (and second) apartment, her marriage, her move out of state. We’ve shared poems, letters and life-changing decisions.

When we met for lunch, we hadn’t seen each other in several years. And yet we started just where we had left, chatting about books, art, clothes, love . . . I saw that she moved with more poise and spoke with greater assurance. She had grown into herself. This is how it feels, I thought, to witness a person becoming.

Wistful and proud, I was standing now on both sides of mentorship, grateful.



It's Thankful Thursday (on Friday), a weekly pause to express gratitude for people, places, things and more. Our joy contracts and expands in direct relation to our thankfulness. What are you thankful for today?

 

Thankful Thursday (on Friday): Blooms

Photo by Jayne Guertin, Suburban Sililoquy
Star Magnolia.* Camellia. Crocus.

Lithodora. Narcissus. Hyacinth.

Bradford Pear. Crabapple. Cherry.

Everything is opening.

I'm strolling into spring with wide smile and dropped jaw. Blue skies. Sunny days. I'm practically skipping. Flowers bloom, days shine, and I'm one with Walt Whitman singing in spring. I embrace e.e. cumming's puddle wonderful world.

On this Thankful Thursday, I rejoice in these first blooms on this first day of spring.

It's Thankful Thursday, a weekly pause to express appreciation for all things, big and small. What are you thankful for today?

 

* Speaking of magnolia, don't you love that movie? Magnolia is one of my Top 10 Favorite Films. 

 

On the Art of Being

Even now, as my life is

winding itself to a close,

I am learning and teaching and 

loving life. Every. Single. Day.


- Currie Silver

 

When we read, creativity stirs.
And when we create, our lives expand.

That's why I ask writers and artists
to share with me books that have
informed their work and life.

The latest edition of 3 Good Books
features Currie Silver, a visual artist
with lung cancer who embodies the
the art of being.

Join us here.

 

 

Try This: Read, then Write

In late-winter, when the holiday glow is long gone and the promise of summer is impossible to hold, monotony can dull the senses.

We're in the middle of things, and my writing mind feels lazy. You too?

I'm doing my best to embrace practices that get me in the groove.

Lately I've started each writing session by reading the work of another poet. This allows me to slip into a new language and pace, which then informs my own writing. Many times the exercise yields blah blah blah, but I'm still exercising the writing muscle. Writing, even "bad writing," is never wasted. 

I choose readings at random, paging through an anthology, and have been happy to discover new-to-me poems, some of which have led to "keeper" lines and poems of my own.  Song by Adrienne Rich, and The Night, the Porch by Mark Strand have been especially inspiring.

Try this: Read someone else's work, then write something, anything, of your own.

Don't think, just write. Let the pen explore phrases, ideas and connections. See where the words take you. Don't try to make sense. Or do. Let go.

Reading other works sets a fresh tone and pace. You slip into a new cadence, and that allows the mind to explore new ground. 

Try it, and let me know where this writing practice takes you.

Try these others too:
Try This: Month by Month
Try This: Postcard Poems
Try This: Alphabet Poem
Try This: Morning Read & Write
Try This: Book Spine Poetry
Try This: Poetry Poker

 

Both deep and oblique

The effect of landscape,

homescape, on me

is both deep and oblique . . .

It teaches me inclusiveness

and gratitude.


- Paulann Petersen

 

When we read, creativity stirs.
And when we create, our lives expand.

That's why I ask writers and artists
to share their favorite books.

The latest edition of 3 Good Books
features Paulann Petersen, who served
as Oregon Poet Laureate from 2010 to 2014.

Please join me.

 

 

Thankful Thursday: Are you in?

Everyone in!

From pebble to peak, from profound to profane, it's time again for Thankful Thursday.

Because attention attracts gratitude and gratitude expands joy, it's time to slice through the ugly and get to the good.

What you need now isn't the work
Of regret but the work of gratitude.
And all it takes to be grateful is to feel grateful.

 

Go back to the beginning and embrace its bounty.
Beneath the story of cause and consequence
Another story is pointing another way.

 

— Carl Dennis
excerpt from Not the End


Let's make a new story, start a new song.  Are you in?


Another story

Morning sun. A distant view. Your voice.
After a season of doubt, a small certainty.
The crocus return, as they do, each late winter.

The sky clears, as it does.

A bluebird sails before me, catches my step.
This is not metaphor. This is Monday.
I know the ache of reaching to meet spring.

The beautiful ache.

- Drew Myron

 

It's Thankful Thursday. Please join me.
What are you thankful for today?

 

The words that weren’t


The mind reads and races, and sees what it wants to see.

Proof in this week's misreads: 


• Cheapskate contends CEO stole data

should have been  . . .  Chesapeake contends CEO stole data


• Get ready for this weekend’s Supermom

was actually . . .  Get ready for this weekend’s Supermoon


•  Is it worth all the sweat and fears? 

was actually . . .  Is it worth all the sweat and tears?

 

 Your turn. What are you (mis)reading?

 

Where are all the working poets?

With the passing this week of Philip Levine the literary world heaves with loss.

A Pulitzer Prize-winner, Levine served as U.S. poet laureate from 2011- 2102, and while his death was not a surprise — he was 87 and in failing health — the greater sadness is that he represented a rapidly disappearing type of writer: the working man's poet.

Levine was an auto-worker turned writer who grew up in Detroit.

“I saw that the people that I was working with . . . were voiceless in a way,” he explained in Detroit Magazine. “In terms of the literature of the United States they weren’t being heard. Nobody was speaking for them. . . I took this foolish vow that I would speak for them and that’s what my life would be."

While many poets work in universities as professors or in literary jobs related to publishing, working class poets seem scant. And their voices, when we stumble upon them, feel fresh and real.

Where are the working poets?

I'm thinking of Mather Schneider, a cab driver in Arizona.

And the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering, an annual celebration of rural American West. The event is held every January in Elko, Nevada and for over 30 years has drawn a robust collection of working cowboys and ranching families expressing their culture through poetry, music and storytelling.

And the Fisher Poets Gathering, an annual celebration of commercial fishermen and fisherwomen poets. The event takes place in late February in Astoria, Oregon, and features over 75 fisher poets performing music, poetry and prose. "It's not just old guys looking backward," says founder Jon Broderick. "We hear the voices of people from across the commercial fishing spectrum: deckhands, skippers and cannery workers, young and old, women and men, west coast and east."

What Work Is

We stand in the rain in a long line
waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work.
You know what work is—if you’re
old enough to read this you know what
work is, although you may not do it.
Forget you. This is about waiting,
shifting from one foot to another.
Feeling the light rain falling like mist
into your hair, blurring your vision
until you think you see your own brother
ahead of you, maybe ten places.
You rub your glasses with your fingers,
and of course it’s someone else’s brother,
narrower across the shoulders than
yours but with the same sad slouch, the grin
that does not hide the stubbornness,
the sad refusal to give in to
rain, to the hours of wasted waiting,
to the knowledge that somewhere ahead
a man is waiting who will say, “No,
we’re not hiring today,” for any
reason he wants. You love your brother,
now suddenly you can hardly stand
the love flooding you for your brother,
who’s not beside you or behind or
ahead because he’s home trying to   
sleep off a miserable night shift
at Cadillac so he can get up
before noon to study his German.
Works eight hours a night so he can sing
Wagner, the opera you hate most,
the worst music ever invented.
How long has it been since you told him
you loved him, held his wide shoulders,
opened your eyes wide and said those words,
and maybe kissed his cheek? You’ve never
done something so simple, so obvious,
not because you’re too young or too dumb,
not because you’re jealous or even mean
or incapable of crying in
the presence of another man, no,   
just because you don’t know what work is.

- Philip Levine

Thankful Thursday: How to sleep & write


Step off assuredly into the blank of your mind.

Something will come to you.

- Richard Wilbur


This week I stumbled across these words and took them as encouragement. On this Thankful Thursday, I am thankful for gentle reminders.

The line is from Walking to Sleep, a poem by Richard Wilbur — but I didn't know the lines were from a poem, and didn't even know it was referring to sleep (I found the lines here, in an interview with Anne Tyler). Later, I found the poem and an interview in which Wilbur says "this is a poem about advising someone else on how to get off to sleep."

All week I thought he was offering an insider tip on how to write. But no matter, we take words when and how we need 'em. Maybe my gratitude is for these words, and maybe my gratitude is for the pathways that lead to the people and places that harbor just what I need.

 

Gratitude. Appreciation. Praise.

It's Thankful Thursday, a weekly pause to express appreciation for people, places, things, and more.

What are you thankful for today?

 

And yet


To have loved
and to have suffered. To have waited
for nothing, and for nothing to have come.

— Laura Kasischke

 

A teen girl is shot in the street.

A young man dies on a college campus.

A mother throws her son off a bridge.

Within days, inevitably, a vigil. Candles on cue, to a refrain that has played too many times: This community comes together in support.

But what good is it now, our hand-wringing and alarm, this cooing disguised as comfort?

We are urgent with a terrorized sort of sadness. We come together. But every day we are divided, by politics and opinions, by wounds and hurts. It seems only tragedy binds us.

___

It’s easy to feel stricken. Difficult to put love into action day after day.

___

A friend cried through the Super Bowl commercials. Were the ads that touching, she asks, or is that I've been sick all week and my resistance is low?

Some days a slice of light against the wood floor can break me open.

But isn’t that what we all need now, to feel more?

Let us lower our resistance.

___

And yet. The hand-wringing. The calls for change. It’s exhausting.

Because our pleas ring hollow, small. We feel so much but do so little.

___

But what action, really, would be substantial, meaningful, enough?

___

So long I was surrounded by vitality. Now, neighbors, friends, and family are dying. This is not new. But the sting is fresh.

A friend offers what seems simple but sage advice: “Just love them now and for the rest of your days and know that they love you.”

Loving, then, is that easy? And that hard.

___

I get a massage, but what I really want is a spiritual experience. Strong hands to dig through flesh to find gristle and bone, to excise the deep cavities where sadness takes hold. I want to be remade, cleansed, and spare.

___

The night is briny and thick. Somewhere, someone, is sinking. Someone is always dying.

___

Death is sorrowful but not tragic. Let us not turn this into a project.

___

And yet, let us not turn away.

 

 

Thankful Thursday: 50

Gratitude. Appreciation. Praise.

It's Thankful Thursday, a weekly pause to express appreciation for people, places, things, and more. Please join me.  

The world is big, my gratitudes many:

1.
searchers, seekers, doubters, thinkers

2.
honeycrisp apples

3.
sunny mornings

4.
signs and reminders

5.
socks

6.
the concept of "literary citizenship"

7.
daffodils in February

8.
cashmere

9.
kindness

10.
good wine for $10 (or less)

11.
this poem 

12.
and this poem  

13.
quiet

14.
soup (making, eating)

15.
finding my words in unexpected places (this and this)

16.
attribution (because giving credit is good, and, well, see above)

17.
Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen

18.
nuts, especially sweet

19.
this essay by Heather King

20.
blue skies (as weather and metaphor)

21.
the "good" family genes: wide smile, bright eyes, bleeding heart

22.
teachers who cared: Mrs. Allison, Mrs. Trembath, Stanton Englehart

23.
Summer Camp Writers

24.
television with great writing/direction/acting: Treme, The Wire

25.
the films Robin Williams left us: Good Will Hunting, Awakenings, Patch Adams

26.
being useful

27.
moving in water: swimming, kayaking, paddleboarding, soaking, floating, gazing, lazing

28.
writers and artists who tell me their favorite books

29.
poetry in unexpected places: laundromats, hair salons, bars, alleys, telephone poles . . .

30.
a mentor-turned-friend

31.
letters, handwritten

32.
bubble baths

33.
secrets

34.
going to a party/dinner/event I don't want to attend, and having fun

35.
stretches of time to read unfettered

36.
libraries

37.
post office, mailbox, "real" mail

38.
Carnegie Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art

39.
thrift and consignment stores

40.
books that get me energized to write (this, this, and this)

41.
deadlines and structure

42.
a haircut

43.
Powell's Books, because it shelves new and used snug together in a democracy of literature

44.
letting go

45.
long summer days

46.
young writers who grow up, move on, away, and then send me letters, postcards, rocks, cookies, poems . . .

47.
this explanation by Terry Tempest Williams

48.
endurance

49.
people with quick wit and easy laughter

50.
Dr. Teal's Epsom Salt Soaking Solution

 

What are you thankful for today?


Stacked

Happiness is a fresh stack of books. I can't wait to dig into these:

Small Disasters Seen in Sunlight — new poetry by Julia B. Levine, a psychologist working with abused children. Her previous book, Ditch Tender, is one of my favorites

Be Thrifty: How to Live Better with Less — because I'm a minimalist who loves discounts and deals (note: I bought a used copy)

Dear Thief by Samantha Harvey — a novel/letter/love story

Deep Water by Patricia Highsmith — this is my first venture into this revered writer's psychological thrillers

Shadows of the Workhouse by Jennifer Worth — second book in the Call the Midwife series (which the PBS show is based upon)

Euphoria, by Lily King — her newest novel (I liked her last book, Father of the Rain)

Delicious!, by Ruth Reichl — though she's written numerous books, this is the restaurant critic's first work of fiction (Tender at the Bone was a fantastic memoir of her childhood)

 

What's on your shelf? What are you eager to read?

 

Thankful Thursday: Drive-Thru


Dear Driver of the Car In Front of Me at Starbucks:

When we pulled up for our coffees, the barista said, "Your drinks have been paid for by the car ahead of you."

You were driving away, anonymous and generous. I like your style.

We were stunned and giddy.

"This happens pretty often," she said. "You'd be surprised."

The world, and people, can be so darn nice.

Thanks for reminding me.

xo

Drew


Gratitude. Praise. Appreciation. Please join me for Thankful Thursday, a weekly pause to express appreciation for people, places, things, and more. What are you thankful for today?

 

One line at a time


But for all poets, it’s not their

books that I go back to, that I consider

important, but it’s a few, or maybe many,

poems. I read one poem at a time and

almost one line at a time. The line is the

most important element of a poem,

of poetry, to me.


- Rick Campbell

 

Please join me at Push Pull Books, where I host 3 Good Books
and ask writers to share their favorite books and influences.

 

Thankful Thursday: Why I Write Letters

1.
It's the gentle gesture that draws me, the curve of letters, the slope of a signature, the cross-out in mid-thought. I like letters, the way they slow time to invite reflection for both writer and reader. Letters are tender reminders that feeling is first, just as e.e cummings says.

2.
To celebrate National Handwriting Day on January 23, a friend who owns a wine shop is giving a free glass of wine to anyone who writes her a letter, postcard or note.

3.
Writer and reader share a special language through letters. In each envelope, we seal a message that says, I look for you in these pages, and see my own reflection too.

4.
"In a letter," writes Anne Carson in The Beauty of the Husband, "both reader and writer discover an ideal image of themselves, short blinding passages are all it takes."

5.
Some of my most satisfying writing is rooted in letters. In these of-the-moment conversations, nothing is planned, prepared or overthought.

6.
"The world is full of paper," says Agha Shahid Ali, "Write to me."

 

Gratitude. Praise. Appreciation. Please join me in Thankful Thursday, a weekly pause to express appreciation for people, places, things, and more. What are you thankful for today?

 

Why I bristle when you say you're blessed

New Year's Eve

However busy you are, you should still reserve
One evening a year for thinking about your double,
The man who took the curve on Conway Road
Too fast, given the icy patches that night,
But no faster than you did; the man whose car
When it slid through the shoulder
Happened to strike a girl walking alone
From a neighbor's party to her parents' farm,
While your car struck nothing more notable
Than a snowbank.

One evening for recalling how soon you transformed
Your accident into a comic tale
Told first at a body shop, for comparing
That hour of pleasure with his hour of pain
At the house of the stricken parents, and his many
Long afternoons at the Lutheran graveyard.

If nobody blames you for assuming your luck
Has something to do with you character,
Don't blame him for assuming that his misfortune
Is somehow deserved, that justice would be undone
If his extra grief was balanced later
By a portion of extra joy.

Lucky you, whose personal faith has widened
To include an angel assigned to protect you
From the usual outcome of heedless moments.
But this evening consider the angel he lives with,
The stern enforcer who drives the sinners
Out of the Garden with a flaming sword
And locks the gate.

— Carl Dennis

This poem appeared in The New Yorker
and was reprinted in The Best Spiritual Writing 2013.