Old Tricks

The Art of Dying Well

First you try everything —

memory, gratitude, light.

The trees witness everything

and your braided heart

beats with advice:

let the world

surprise you.

I’m up to my old tricks — collecting words and lines from the nearest thing: cereal box, junk mail, horoscope and bookshelf. This poem is composed of titles from a stack staring at me while I drink my morning coffee.

For writers, readers and word believers, challenge is found at every turn: Write a poem with just six words! Write a letter that includes items from your grocery list! Rearrange these words and make new sense!

Toss me a word, a line, an idea — I’ll make a poem, a ponder, a piece. It’s all taunts and tricks, and these teasers stretch my writing mind and muscle. But mostly they usher me in to possibility.

Poetry is everywhere, says James Tate, it just needs editing.

My book title poem is created from these books: Dear Memory, First You Try Everything, Advice for Future Corpses, The Art of Dying Well, The Trees Witness Everything, A Braided Heart, Gratitude — and a line from horoscope author Holiday Mathis who recently urged Pisces to let the world surprise you.

The element of surprise, combined with attention, stirs the mind and sparks play. Word catching is the start. The rest is add, subtract, hold and release.

Poems hide. In the bottoms of our shoes,

they are sleeping. They are the shadows

drifting across our ceilings the moment

before we wake up. What we have to do

is live in a way that lets us find them.

— Naomi Shihab Nye, from Valentine for Ernest Mann

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The world turns on words, please read & write. 

Thankful Thursday: Filled

Please join me for Thankful Thursday, a weekly pause to express appreciation for things small and large, from the puny to the profound. Because attention attracts gratitude and gratitude expands joy, let us gather thanksgivings.

* * *

Where I live, the land is now flush with fresh food, an abundance of orchards and vineyards. Every field is thick: blueberries, blackberries, apricots, peaches, apples, pears, grapes.

Further on, the fields turn dry in a sepia patchwork of wheat as solitary tractors crawl across hill and slope. A different kind of plenty. A different sort of beauty.

Closer to home, neighbors share their garden bounty, come to me with arms full of tomatoes, cucumbers, and kindness. I am filled.

On morning walks, the sun burns bright. I pass thickets of bachelor buttons and sunflowers with heavy heads. The wind calms and I move into stillness, break through the racket in my head.

At night when windows are wide open, soft air arrives, wraps me in sleep.

Oh this world, this aching beauty.

SEPTEMBER

This far north, the harvest happens late.

Rooks go clattering over the sycamores

whose shadows yawn after them, down to the river.

Uncut wheat staggers under its own weight.

Summer is leaving too, exchanging its gold

for brass and copper. It is not so strange

to feel nostalgia for the present; already

this September evening is as old

as a photograph of itself. The light, the shadows

on the field, are sepia, as if this were

some other evening in September, some other

harvest that went ungathered years ago.

— Dorothy Lawrenson

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The world turns on words, please read & write. 

10(ish) Great Books I Read This Summer

Just like writing, my reading pleasure travels through peaks and valleys. This summer I’m on a ride of really good books.

POETRY

The Trees Witness Everything by Victoria Chang

A brilliant collection of short, powerful poems that are both ethereal brushes and in-the-gut punches.

Passage

Every leaf that falls
never stops falling. I once
thought that leaves were leaves.
Now I think they are feeling,
in search of a place —
someone’s hair, a park bench, a
finger. Isn’t that
like us, going from place to
place, looking to be alive?

Also recommend her other new book: Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief

Bough Down by Karen Green

You really can judge a book by its cover. I chose this book for its great design: a vellum wrap cover with interior pages that feature short blocks of poetic prose and ample white space — places to breathe and rest. The evocative 'story' is told in spare but rich language and combined with small images of text-based art, that makes you slow and rush all at once.

Vintage Sadness by Hanif Willis Abdurraqib

Inspired, influenced, and infused with a wide range of contemporary music — from Kanye to Kirk Franklin and lots more — this poetry collection sings!

My fave: And What Good Will Your Vanity Be When the Rapture Comes.

Download the book (and playlist) for FREE.

FICTION

I Married You For Happiness by Lily Tuck

This is a love story that is tragic, ordinary, and extraordinary — all at the same time. Beautifully told in elegant stops and starts that mimic memory and grief.

Afterlife by Julia Alvarez

A slim, quiet novel with deep reverberations. The story reveals one life jolt after another and asks: What do we owe those in crisis? And how do we live in a broken world without losing faith in one another or ourselves?

NON-FICTION

The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness by Meghan O’Rourke

“Only a few friends realized at the time how much physical suffering I was undergoing. We are bad at recognizing the suffering of others unless we are given clear-cut clues and evidence. And so invisible illnesses often go unacknowledged.”

Brilliant, insightful, scholarly and thorough. Blending the personal and universal, this books provides a sweeping examination of chronic illness —from mysterious symptoms to failed diagnoses, elusive treatments, and the devastating toll disease can take. With clarity, compassion and painstaking research, the author calls for a seismic shift in our approach to disease — and I am cheering her on!

The Art of Dying Well: A Practical Guide to a Good End of Life by Katy Butler

A no-nonsense guide for living, aging, and dying with meaning and joy. Katy Butler offers clear advice with warmth and wisdom, with an emphasis on a life of quality-over-quantity. Also recommend her earlier book: Knocking on Heaven’s Door: The Path to a Better Way of Death.

In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss by Amy Bloom

Amy Bloom writes with humanity and humor.While heartbreaking, this story of an end-of-life decision is told with such wit and candor that it left me in triumphant tears.

These Precious Days: Essays by Ann Patchett

A surprising and moving meditation on family, friendship, reading and writing.

“The trouble with good fortune is that we tend to equate it with personal goodness, so that if things are going well for us and less well for others, it’s assumed they must have done something to have brought that misfortune on themselves while we must have worked harder to avoid it. We speak of ourselves as being blessed, but what can that mean except that others are not blessed, and that God has picked out a few of us to love more? It is our responsibility to care for one another, to create fairness in the face of unfairness and find equality where none may have existed in the past.”

SOME THOUGHTS
There are things you don’t notice until you share your reading choices:

• I’m reading a lot of books about illness and death. (Don’t worry, I’m fine).

• I’m reading a lot of books about marriage. (Don’t worry, I’m happily hitched).

• I’m reading books with tree titles that have little to do with trees:
The Trees Witness Everything and Bough Down

• I’m not trying to read anything. That is, my book choices are random and mostly spontaneous. I keep a running list of books I want to read but an interesting cover or great title can change my course, as does the proliferation of Little Free Libraries.

• Reading is my mental health medicine of choice. What’s yours?

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The world turns on words, please read & write. 

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Writing, Not Writing

Are you doing the work of being a writer?

1.
I let the question simmer, an hour, a day, a week, more. In my head I explain, defend, whine and walk away. Your question is innocent. You know what's important to me and you're offering a gentle encouragement. Not what are you writing, or why aren't you writing but the kindness of a gentle lob that asks:

Is your heart beating, your hand moving?
Do you still move in the world touching everything you want to feel?

2.
I've been numbed into an old exhaustion of caring and not caring. Everything matters so nothing matters. The world is weighty and my words are not able to sustain these winds.

 3.
"I remember nodding as if I was fine. I was fine. I had language. And it would be the one thing that would keep returning, like light," writes Victoria Chang in Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief. “Language felt like wanting to drown but being able to experience drowning by standing on a pier."

4.
Years ago, a poet-friend stopped writing, for an entire year, by choice. You can read about her experience here. “This decision came as a relief,” she said. “Immediately a kind of cocoon began to form around my deepest self.”

At the time of her announcement, I was energized with my own world of writing, reading, teaching, and couldn't imagine why anyone would push words away. I’d lived through writing blocks and serious slumps but to willingly cease seemed so forced and unnecessary.

Time, however, may have softened my view.  

5.
Swimming, I hear my own ragged breath as a sort of secret language. My arms slice through silence and I kick to shore. It's never easy, the strokes, the breathing. I have to think. But all these years, the still water holds me. Is writing the same — instinct and breath?

6.
Find the light, you say.
But the day is dimming and how can I hold what I cannot see?

7.
Don't try so hard.
Give yourself a break.
(but stop whining)

8.
This is your fallow season, you say. Write anyway.

Nearly every day of his life poet William Stafford rose early and wrote a poem.

“It is like fishing,” he explained. “If I am to keep writing, I cannot bother to insist on high standards . . . I am following a process that leads so wildly and originally into new territory that no judgment can at the moment be made about values, significance, and so on . . . I am headlong to discover.”

9.
Today in the forest, tree roots provide a path.

Thick, tangled, ancient, a staircase and walk, a cragged way forward.

Is paying attention a poem, or just a good first step?

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The world turns on words, please read & write. 

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Sob Stories

Sometimes when the world is heavy and your heart is worn, you need a good, wrenching, cleansing, body-shaking cry.

ca·thar·tic

/kəˈTHärdik/

adjective — providing psychological relief through the open expression of strong emotions; causing catharsis, as in: “crying is a cathartic release.”

— from Whistling in the Dark: A Doubters Dictionary by Frederick Buechner

When it’s time for catharsis, I pull out the proper tools: movies, television, and books.

My top movie for a good cleansing cry is always Magnolia. It’s a potent mix of stellar acting, interlacing storylines, and the alchemy of the Aimee Mann soundtrack [particularly the repeated song Save Me, with the lines: “If you could save me / From the ranks of the freaks / Who suspect they could never love anyone.”]

My latest favorite television binge is Six Feet Under. This odd drama series had a devoted following when it debuted 20 years ago and frequently stirs my out-of-nowhere tears.

My favorite tear-inducing novels come unexpectedly. I don’t go looking for catharsis. It just happens, which makes it all the more powerful and cleansing. Years ago, back when I attended church and had more faith in institutions, I had a similar feeling: a sudden rise of emotion that swells in the chest, gathers in the throat, spills over and leaves me both foolish and released. Tears are such a bubbling mystery.

But sometimes you need help finding those feels-good-to-feel-sad kind of books. Please, let me be your guide:

The Good Women of Safe Harbour
by Bobbi French

A life-affirming novel about a woman facing death and mending a friendship.

“Fight. Such a flat, ugly word. Why was everyone forever harping about fighting? I’d taken to reading the obituaries lately, paying close attention to the ones that read ‘lost her courageous battle with cancer’ or some such nonsense. It seemed to me the mortality had somehow been made over as a character defect.”

This beautiful and sometimes funny book is my favorite novel of 2022.

One Heart
by Jane McCafferty

A quiet character study of the simple and conflicting bonds of sisterhood. This is a novel of both despair and hope.

A Little Life
by Hanya Yanagihara

A staggering, brutal, poignant novel about a man physically and emotionally broken. (Caution: As with most things, readers are deeply divided on the brilliance — or not — of this book).

“Somewhere, surrendering to what seemed to be your fate had changed from being dignified to being a sign of your own cowardice.”

The Magical Language of Others
by E.J. Koh

A powerful and aching love story in letters, from mother to daughter, that is written with a level of poetic detachment that provides space to hold the pain.

“Neither happiness nor sadness are ever done with us. They are always passing by.”

The Great Believers
by Rebecca Makkai

A sweeping story that weaves numerous storylines, from AIDS to art to friendships lost and found. Written with beautiful economy and precision.

“But when someone’s gone and you’re the primary keeper of his memory—letting go would be a kind of murder, wouldn’t it? I had so much love for him, even if it was a complicated love, and where is all that love supposed to go?”

Crossing to Safety
by Wallace Stegner

A quiet novel of deep compassion and insight into the bonds of friendship and marriage.

“Sally has a smile I would accept as my last view on earth...”

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Your Turn: What’s your vice for a good cathartic cry?

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The world turns on words, please read & write. 

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You Reading This

Dear S —

This letter has sat in my head, in my heart, for too long.

I think of you often and jot silent notes that I never seem to send.

So this is to say: I’m thinking of you. You hold a place in my heart where time sits still and daily life matters little. I’ve missed that sense of suspension, where worries are placed gently away.

These last few years have been difficult in such varied and complicated ways. The stress and strain of the pandemic, compounded with racial injustice, economic turmoil, international upheaval . . . and that’s not even our personal challenges of sickness and aging, sadness and defeat. More than ever we see the dominoes of our lives tip, collide, fall away.

How do we keep on? How do you?

I’d like to say poetry has helped me float but in this last year my well has gone dry. I’m now facing the fact that poetry is in my past, a person I use to be.

Maybe it is love that gets us through these difficult days. It’s hardly an original thought — but there’s a reason cliches are called just that: there’s truth in the refrain.

Maybe it is the small gratitudes that sustain. This morning the sun bursts through a month of damp days and I am suddenly restored. Hope springs in small ways and I am larger for it. As the sun moves across the room I’m warmed by the memory of a Stafford line — how sunlight creeps along a shining floor.

I am warmed by the memory of you and I drinking coffee and tea in that cozy coffeeshop, playing Bananagrams while the rain and wind thrashed our small town and we, safe inside, laughed and sighed. How simple time seems as it ticks along, how complex the memory of days past.

I am not waiting for time to show some better thoughts. I am here, now, in my head, my heart, and on this page, thankful for you and our friendship.

With love,

Drew

You Reading This, Be Ready

Starting here, what do you want to remember?

How sunlight creeps along a shining floor?

What scent of old wood hovers, what softened

sound from outside fills the air?

Will you ever bring a better gift for the world

than the breathing respect that you carry

wherever you go right now? Are you waiting

for time to show you some better thoughts?

When you turn around, starting here, lift this

new glimpse that you found; carry into evening

all that you want from this day. This interval you spent

reading or hearing this, keep it for life  —

What can anyone give you greater than now,

starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?

— William Stafford

On Sunday: Rest

In you the heart

seeks no barrier.

Clouds come and rest.

— Drew Myron

A friend wrote recently:

My poems get shorter because there’s too much to say.

I’m there too. In the throes of steady high alert — health, war, injustice, economy — I’m both paying attention and turning away. I’m holding in and back, holding on, conserving every emotional expense. There’s just so much and I’m both enlarged with frustration and reduced by fatigue.

But the world beyond my head lifts in hope: sun strains to shine, lilacs urge to burst, and everywhere trees bloom in glorious color and scent.

All is now, now, now, this, this, this. All is well.

And all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.
— Julian of Norwich

Shall We Drink?

Thought 179, an erasure poem by Drew Myron

Dear You,

The days wear on, and I think of you often. 

Are you healthy, happy, well? 

We are doing the best we can, feeding heart and mind with memories and wine, trying to find light in dark days. You know how it is. You do what you can do. 

We find solace in small things: walks, talks, bike rides, sun and snow. I read and write. We forget more. Quiet lives. 

I don't have much to say these days. It's not sadness I feel, though this letter has taken a tone — but maybe it's a grey day in late winter and a sense of resignation has taken hold. You must know this feeling too, a suspended state that tilts toward acceptance but with a resistance that pulls away.  

We hope to travel again, to see you soon & hold you close. Though the heart strains to contain the world, we have not forgotten how to love.

Love, 
Drew

Thought 179:

Shall we drink? 

My dear friend, 
I have misjudged time!
My friend, I have opened 
my heart, weeping.
Shall we drink? 

— Drew Myron 

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The world turns on words, please read & write. 

Well Read: Keeping the Mind Fed

Oh winter of our hibernation. Like fields, we go fallow, into deep rest and restoration. I’ve gone deep into books and it’s been a good reading season.

Here are a few of my latest favorites, along with lines and passages that struck a chord.

FICTION

Someone by Alice McDermott

A slim, subtle novel of substantial beauty. The novel, says the author, grew out of the belief that on some level, we more or less all struggle with the same things.

“We turned onto the last landing. Going out with this guy, I thought, would involve a lot of silly laughter, some wit — the buzz of his whispered wisecracks in my ear. But there would be as well his willingness to reveal, or more his inability to conceal, that he had been silently rehearsing my name as he climbed the stairs behind me. There would be his willingness to bestow upon me the power to reassure him. He would trust me with his happiness.”

The Five Wounds by Kirstin Valdez Quade

A tender and redemptive novel spanning one year in a family of five generations.

“What no one appreciates is that it takes courage — and considerable dramatic flair — to show up and insist you belong, to invoke genetic claims and demand food and love and housing.”

The Last Thing He Told Me by Laura Dave

An easy mystery with a quick page-turning pace.

“This is the thing about good and evil. They aren't so far apart, and they often start from the same valiant place of wanting something to be different.”

NONFICTION

Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion by Gregory Boyle

A practical memoir of radical love from a priest who spent 20 years working with Los Angeles gangs.

“Here is what we seek: a compassion that can stand in awe at what the poor have to carry rather than stand in judgement at how they carry it.”

Your Turn: Are you in hibernation, too? What books are feeding your mind & soul?

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The world turns on words, please read & write. 

Thankful Thursday: Bad Advice

Reminder 13: Bad Advice, by Drew Myron

In my early days of poetry, I attended a writing workshop in which the instructor gave a list of don’ts:

Do not write about the moon.

Do not use these words:
muse, moonlight, soul, eternity, thee, thus, lavender

While I agree the world needs less musing, I love lavender. But because I was green and eager-to-please, I did not question authority. It took me years to sneak lavender into a poem. I still shrink from mentions of the moon.

Advice sticks. Good or bad, it tends to hang around in the head.

Growing up my mother warned us to avoid white bread and McDonalds. Good advice that still hounds me today. But she also frequently told me to “Go play in traffic.”

You take the good with the bad, and hope for the best.

It’s Thankful Thursday, a weekly pause to express appreciation for people, places, things and more. Why give thanks? Because joy contracts and expands in proportion to our gratitude, and these difficult days call for more peace and joy. On this Thankful Thursday, I’m grateful for advice — good and bad — that got me here, still alive & writing.

What are you thankful for today?

More Reminders:

No. 10

No. 11

No. 12

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Under the Influence

What are you reading, watching, singing?

How are you sleeping? What are you eating?

Who whispers in your ear? What roars?

What’s influencing you?

We know that everything is grist for the mill of the mind. Everything is material. We read, read, read, write, write, write, muddle, miss the mark, toss, turn, and start again.

Who knows how the mind filters and files — what to keep, what to toss, and why?

“Your triggering subjects are those that ignite your need for words,” writes Richard Hugo in the seminal book The Triggering Town. “When you are honest to your feel­ings, that triggering town chooses you. Your words used your way will generate your meanings. Your obsessions lead you to your vocabulary. Your way of writing locates, even creates, your inner life.”

Ten years ago, I was struck by this poem by Olena Kalytiak Davis.

Two years ago, I snapped this photo while driving across eastern Oregon.

Earlier this month, a storm delivered days and days of heavy snow.

Two weeks ago, our writing group was prompted to write about the new year.

Holiday, weather, postcard, pandemic, darkness and light, pressure and pleasure — one influence after another. Experience forms feeling, words stir, a poem takes shape.

I don’t know how the mind sifts and sorts. I’m not trying to write anything; I’m trying to write something, everything. The mystery of writing keeps me trying.

What’s influencing you?

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The world turns on words, please read & write. 

Switch & List

Hello Writers, Readers, Thinkers & Feelers,

How are you — I mean, really?

These are the spiral days. The pandemic surges on, nerves fray, winter feels chronically gray, and the mood is a long swirling plummet.

Maybe this is not your story. Maybe you’re meeting up, dining out, and thriving. Your creativity is off the charts, your skin is glowing, your hair bouncing, and your body is leaner and cleaner than ever.

Good for you. I’m not there and I envy your ease.

We’re in fractured worlds, and I’m among those living with health conditions. We tread lightly and with trepidation, while the rest of the world feels healthy and strong, sure they’ll recover from a health bump in an otherwise smooth road.

Because nearly every topic now divides, I no longer share my worries, details or opinions. I’m trying not to sneer at the unmasked and unconcerned. But it’s hard to hold back the fear and frustration. And really, aren’t we all exhausted?

Among writer-friends, I’m seeing a new sort of writer’s block — a creative numb. Externally, the world swirls in a succession of bad events and information while internally the creative world plods along weary and worn.

I feel like I’m living this poem:

The Well

It's not that the well's run dry.
The walk feels too far. It's uphill
in the snow both ways, and
who has the strength to carry
those dangling buckets balanced
on their shoulders now? I'll stay
on this secondhand chair, wrapped
in my mother's holey shawl.
Make another cup of tea, stay quiet.
Grief sits with me by the fire.
Out the window, tiny birds track 
hieroglyphics across the icy ground.

 — Rachel Barenblat

This week our writing group-by-email was prompted to write a list poem. The work trickled in slowly and, well, listless. This poem seemed to capture our collective mood:

Nothing Today

No juncos.

No kudos.

No innuendoes.

No Spaghettios.

No crows.

No jokes.

No hope.

No hoboes. 

No heroes. 

No romance.

No spotted thrushes.

No applesauce. 

No asparagus.

No appurtenances.  

No tennis shoes.

No aphorisms.

No witticisms. 

No chickadees.

No maladies.

No vitamins. 

No robins.

No ravens.

No eagles.

No sea gulls. 

No guile.

No homilies.

No similes.

No turns.

No terns.

No adverbs.

No apologies.

No advertisements.

No boots.

No coots.

No comment.

No point.

— Penelope Scambly Schott

Tell me: How do you keep the pen moving along the page? (Yes, I still prefer pen and paper). How’s your writing, your head, your heart?

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The world turns on words, please read & write. 

What’s In Your Book Stack?

Is there anything better than a stack of books and a comfy couch (except for maybe a stack of books and a warm beach)?

I’m in deep winter mode — snow, ice, cold — and starting the new year burrowed in fiction, poetry, memoir, self-help, and more. Some of the books were gifted to me and many were gifts to myself. Have a book lingering on your want-to-read list? Go ahead, treat yourself.

Here are a few of my latest favorites:

All the Words by Magda Kapa
Poet and photographer Magda Kapa has created a beautifully designed and stunning “poetic dictionary” comprised of aphorisms, epigrams and short “naked verse.”

Mistake: mostly done again and again until it has a name.

Night: sight to the inside.

Sanity: one bank of the river

Whereas: Poems by Layli Long Soldier
This poetry collection has earned a long list of awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award — and for good reason. Through a variety of poetic forms and styles, Layli Long Solider confronts government responses, treaties, and apologies to Native American peoples and tribes. With astounding restraint and emotional power, this poet offers song and scream with bolts of essential light.

While we’re just over a week into the new year, this book (published in 2017) is now my favorite poetry collection of 2022.

Small Beauties: Poems by Ann Staley
With six books in just ten years, Oregon poet and teacher Ann Staley is a prolific writer, and a master of small moments. She’s an inspiration, a light, and a friend to all.

What saves us is our love for each other
and the moments we recall
at the end of any ordinary day.
What went well? Maybe this poem.

Your turn: What are you reading in this new year?

The World in a Word

New year, new page, new start.

Sure, right, whatever.

Even in a good year — and 2021 was a soul crusher — I’m not a fan of resolutions. The performance of commitment seems, well, a bit much. All that dogged determination wears me out. I don’t ring in the new year as much as let it creep across the floor and hope the draft is warm and the light is soft.

Sometimes I choose a word to guide the way. Remember when everyone was doing that choose-a-word exercise (everyone = poets, writers, bloggers)? One year useful called to me; I mean, really, I was adrift and feeling useless. The more I looked for ways to be of use, the more useful I became (that was a good year). But lately, aside from read, rest and wine, there is no resounding word. Nothing calls me.

Remember when we were urging each other to fail better? That too felt like overreach.

Last night I watched what I thought would be an annoyingly sappy movie — It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (Netflix) — and much to my surprise I cried all the way through. I suspect the tears were stirred not just by the movie but by a wave of emotion that pulled me under because for so long now the world feels both sharp and fragile. My tears were cathartic catch and release. (Today I found the magazine story by Tom Junod that formed the seed of the movie, and I was awed by the writing, and now the movie has moved me even more).

In these endings, and these beginnings, in these days of uncertainty, of sickness and struggle, of unexpected laughter followed by rushing tears, I often feel about to topple. It can be a stinging tone or a car too close. It’s the frozen pipe, the broken furnace, the sour milk, the icy step. All is glass and slick and I’m losing my feet, my head, my heart. This feeling won’t last, I’m sure, but good lord we’ve all been on this road for so damn long.

This year, not a word. Not a list of self-improvements. This poem calls me. The Work of Christmas by Howard Thurman is the work of every day. I’d like to live this poem. Maybe that’s my word — live — and my resolution, too.

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The world turns on words, please read & write. 

What You Give

Be radiant light. Shine on.

- Drew Myron

1.
When we most need light, which is to say hope, the holidays arrive. Is it chance? It can’t be coincidence that the giving season takes place during the darkest, coldest time of the year.

2.
I keep thinking of the poem When Giving Is All We Have by Alberto Rios.

We give because someone gave to us.

3.
Life is a bustle of lists, gifts, food. We light candles and trees, and wrap ourselves into folly. The days are short, nights long, and we’re clinging to any slant of light. When our need is most pressing, we get the nudge that urges us to step out of ourselves, think of others.

We give because giving has changed us.

4.
For months I’ve been trying to write about Pearl and Doris and Walt and Addie and the many others I meet while delivering Meals on Wheels.

Like small stones worried smooth, each person is now lodged in my heart. I think of the man who waits at his door each week to greet me with full-smile and small talk; the woman too sick to chat; the man with a nurse who thanks me for the hot meal; the woman who invites me inside to admire the glow of her Christmas tree.

We give because giving could have changed us.

5.
Maybe I read too much into a moment. Maybe I want to feel something other than the dread and sadness I often carry. Maybe this is nothing more than a weekly task and I’m turning a small scrap into a warm quilt.

6.
But I keep thinking of the woman who can hardly hear and barely see, whose house smells of too many cats.

Each week I’m a new mystery to solve. Still, she often gives a smile and her eyes turn a dazzling blue. She comes to life, and we laugh about nothing, and I like to think we’re both happy — even briefly.

Then she roots around the pocket of the tattered cardigan that hangs from her frail shoulders and offers me a wad of bills.

“Oh thank you,” I say, suddenly flustered and grateful and sad. “You keep that. Spend that on yourself.”

She nods and smiles, and we wave our goodbyes.

You gave me what you did not have.

* For privacy, names have been changed.

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The world turns on words, please read & write. 

I Was Moved: Books of 2021

Read any good books lately?

I’m always reading something, and get nervous when my reading stack runs low. And though I read every day, I’m not often moved. I’m occupied, engaged, and sometimes engrossed, but it takes a lot to move me. The most wonderful reading experience is when I don’t want to do anything that will take me off the page. The writing is so good, the characters so real, the feelings so vivid that I want to binge on the pleasure but also don’t want the story to end. It’s a rare book that can deliver this delightful mix.

In 2021, these books moved me:

What Could Be Saved by Liese O'Halloran Schwarz

The memories of their parents were like that, sometimes filled with fury, sometimes love, sometimes sorrow. Unforgivable things mixing with dumbfounding things and tender things, the same event in equal parts hilarious and enraging. There was no one way to think of their childhoods.

Set in 1972, this suspenseful literary mystery is a masterfully woven tale of family, siblings, secrets and hope. Stellar writing both comforts and transports.

Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng 

Before that she hadn’t realized how fragile happiness was, how if you were careless, you could knock it over and shatter it.

In this profound portrait of family, culture, and belonging a story of beautifully aching characters is built. This is Ng’s debut novel, published a few years before Little Fires Everywhere, the bestselling novel that was turned into a television series.

Monogamy by Sue Miller

She’d thought she was memorable. How clear it was that she was not. It wasn’t a quality you possessed, she thought now. It was a quality other people endowed you with.

In this deep and heart-full novel about the complexities of love, marriage, and grief, Sue Miller is master of the details of daily life.

The Magical Language of Others by E.J. Koh

Neither happiness nor sadness are ever done with us. They are always passing by.

A powerful and aching love story of mother and daughter, told in letters. A beautifully written memoir rendered with a poetic detachment that provides space to hold the pain.

Rules for Visiting by Jessica Francis Kane

Others get to midlife, look around — sort of the way you might reexamine your living room when you need a new sofa — and say, What do I have here? What is this room I’ve made? Halfway through life, I wasn’t sure what I’d made.

Don’t let this cutesy cover fool you. What seems a lightweight tale is a wonderfully quiet and charming novel of friendship and self-examination.

The Second O of Sorrow by Sean Thomas Dougherty

Why Bother

Because right now, there is someone
out there with
a wound in the exact shape
of your words.

This poetry collection gathers together a striking blend of short powerful poems and lyrical prose pieces from a poet described as “a blue-collar, Rust Belt romantic to his generous, enthusiastic core.”

Your Turn: Read any good books lately? What books moved you?

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The world turns on words, please read & write. 

Who Are You?

Six Word Memoir by Drew Myron

Can you tell your life story in six words? 

Six Word Memoirs are the potato chips of poetry. You don't think you're hungry so you eat just one, but the salt is so delicious you just can't stop. Go on, make a mess, eat the whole bag. 

No really, give it a go. Once you write one, you’ll find yourself thinking of everything in six-word summations.

Six Word Memoirs were introduced in 2006 by Larry Smith, a writer and editor who went on to create a massive series of bestselling Six-Word Memoirs. 

I love this form! Years ago, the first six words I wrote turned out to be the theme of this blog (and my life):

Push words, pull light, carry balm.

Recently, my writing group — a hardworking and hardwriting collection of writers from all over the map (literally and literarily) who ‘meet’ weekly by email — played with six word arrangements. The gems they created are simple, striking, surprising . . . and fun to write & read.

Here, with permission, are a few:

Loving, being loved.
Work.
Books.
Noticing.

— Vicki Hellmer 

tried to become

someone I'd miss

— Shawnte Orion

Triptych 

 1) 
hide, seek,
lost, found,
repeat, repeat

2)
 moon song,
swoon song,
swan song

3)
 ruby slippers for sale,
well-worn

— Audrey Mlakar

Four Attempts by Sarah Cook

Sarah Cook enlarged the idea to create four linked nuggets, combined with her photos. See the series on Instagram @ freelance.feminist

Your Turn: Write a Six Word Memoir (or two, or ten . . . ). And if you’re feeling communal, share with me.

Write on!

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The world turns on words, please read & write. 

Thankful Thursday: Gather Gladness

I can’t stop scribbling these pages.

On this Thankful Thursday, I’m thankful for worn old books.

Day after day, these thin yellowed pages call me awake. The erasure poem — or in my case, one or two ‘found’ lines — is just the low-stakes, high-yield sense of accomplishment I need right now. When my thoughts are dull and mind is stalled, finding an unexpected nugget is a small and lovely yes.

Do you know Mary Ruefle, master of wry and beautiful erasure poems? She spends every morning in old books erasing text. She’s made over 100 books and her mind works in mysterious, wonderful ways. I’m thankful for her, too.

It’s the season of gratitude (and platitude). I work hard to avoid the sappy praise of rainbows and kittens. But some days there is a rainbow, and I feel the jolting swerve of gratitude, platitude, joy. And really, I’m grateful for the swerve.

Gather gladness

and spread delight.

Love the gales that

sweep the dream.

Joy expands and contracts in direct relation to our sense of gratitude. What are you thankful for today? A person, a place, a thing? A story, a song, a poem? What makes your world, your heart, expand?

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The world turns on words, please read & write. 

On Sunday: Tumult

The Tumult

In this fever

we wonder

what

links

us.

tu·​mult | \ ˈtü-ˌməlt
noun
1 : noise and excitement, or a state of confusion, change, or uncertainty

There’s so much noise now.

Even in the quiet spaces, especially in the quiet places.

In mind and heart, I feel the tumult of the times. I’m trying to turn down the volume, turn up the good, trying to make something in the rumble. For now, I’m erasing to find my way.

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The world turns on words, please read & write. 

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On Sunday: Autumn Rain

Rain, rain, and rain.

It’s a good day for old books. For small thoughts. For space to fill the gaps, for words to fill the space. For erasing one thing to make room for anything. For making meaning from absence. For marking your days, your page, your life.

Join me, please. Make something.

Let
the sound
of autumn
rain secret
tears.

— Drew Myron

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If you like this blog, please subscribe here to get it delivered directly to your email. And please share or forward to a friend. The world turns on words, please read & write.