Things I Remember at Oma & Opa's House (April 2014) [Katrina]

 Well if this isn't apropos... My family spent most of this past weekend at my grandparents' house, as next weekend the estate sale guy comes to get that underway. In keeping with not 1 but 2 writing/posting prompts ("I remember" & old writing), I found this from April 2014. It was in my first writing class- at the Kings' wonderful condo. My Oma was in the middle of some health issues & we weren't sure what the future would hold. 

......................................................................

I realized this week...Oma & Opa's house is really my childhood home. Not that I've ever lived there, but of all my houses, that's the one that's stayed the same. It feels so safe & comfy & gemütlich. So on top of everything else crazy this week, the thought of that so-known, always-there place not being as it always was is sad, & kind of scary.

I remember eating snacks & watching glorious 90s cartoons after kindergarten.

I remember playing Boxcar Children, with Allison & I, & Big Boy [a giant teddy bear] as our little brother.

I remember playing Barbies with lego houses and cardboard-cutout Ken.

I remember playing in the backyard- Pocahontas (in my moccasins, always making Allison be the secondary parts), making blanket forts, "painting" the birdbath, oom-pa-pa-ing to the Bayless High School Band early in the morning. Even going over the fence to play with the neighbor. I certainly remember picking gooseberries and never eating them.

I remember hiding with Allison in the closet during As the World Turnssss-uh.

I remember coming back completely worn out from morning trips to the Zoo, Shaw's Garden, or Grant's Farm, to a lunch of frozen White Castles & fries, tomatoes, & little pickles.

I remember spending countless in-from-Mexico weekends sharing my room with Allison, the comfiest bed ever- still true.

I remember reading umpteen magazines 30 years too old for me in the living room, & getting $1 per grade for good report cards, & definitely watching countless hours of Mary Kate & Ashley movies.

I remember Easters- making coconut-laden bunny cakes & dyeing & finding REAL eggs.

I remember 20 Christmases of the white-&-gold tree, opening presents in our exact spots.

And of course I remember food- holiday feasts, Christmas cookies (making & devouring), countless brunches, my ever birthday cake- chocolate with buttercream, and always, always, always Oma in the kitchen, at the stove with something bubbling or mixing something using 50-year-old dishes.

Lately I remember chess with wonderful wood pieces, being beaten mercilessly but being glad for it.

In Oma & Opa's backyard, a month after I wrote this

Sempre Avanti [by Mark]

 Sempre avanti, Italian. “Always keep moving forward.”

I first learned this expression from Helena, a friend who typically signed off her letters with this expression, or else with Coraggio. A historian and a convert to Catholicism, she worked with me on peace and justice issues in the 1980s and kept in touch over the years. Several decades older than me, Helena took a lively interest in my academic work on Elie Wiesel.

In later years, she was afflicted with breast cancer and severe arthritis, but she remained lucid, gentle, and passionate. The year after Mev died, one day Helena came home to find a note from her husband, an immigrant “self-made” businessman millionaire. He had to leave her, he had written, because he had so much life he still wanted to live.

Limitless Potential [by Mark]

After last night's rich sharing by Annie on the tensions in a writer's life (e.g., mainstream publishing and/or self-publishing), I recalled the following from one of my favorite writers...

That still unrecognized prophet, Abbie Hoffman, said, almost forty years ago, that if you want to start a revolution, don’t bother to organize, seize a televisions station. With the internet, we all have our own tv stations and publishing companies and newspapers; we are all our own columnists and investigative reporters. The potential is limitless:  Trent Lott was brought down by a blog, all the doubts about the war that are seeping into the general public began online, and just this week Lovely Laura’s Poetry Tea got canceled thanks to an e-mail petition. 

--Eliot Weinberger, 2003

Hildegard & cookies of joy [Katrina]

This is the article on Hildegard von Bingen I mentioned (or, fangirled over) this evening:

https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2020/11/19/saint-hildegard-coronavirus-catholic-joy 

A few quotes/excerpts I particularly enjoy-

Because Hildegard cookies are made with spelt flour and the aforementioned spices, they are the equivalent of a medieval happiness bomb.

.......................................

Cookies of joy some call them in English, because according to the 12th-century Benedictine abbess, the cookies remove hate from the heart and calm the nerves. As a lifelong cookie aficionado, I must confess that I find this true of most cookies. 

......................................

Covid-19 taught me that isolation and solitude are not the same thing; one is like being locked behind a stone wall, while the other is like drinking from a holy well. Often they go hand in hand, and we must abide loneliness to cultivate solitude and arrive at the well.

.....................................

 She was both wild and obedient, frail and unstoppable, a simple nun and a human dynamo, the likes of which the world had rarely seen.

...................................

You can love something with your whole heart, Hildegard shows, and still want to improve it. Our collective and personal wounds must be tended, Hildegard says with the actions of her life, but neither should they keep us from our joys and commitments—what she called “the festive service of God.”

Fun fact- it is dishearteningly difficult to find an image of Hildegard where she doesn't look absolutely annoyed with life. Which makes no sense considering how radiantly joyful she evidently was! This one is OK though.

Things I Hate by Lindsay Wolff [via Mark]

 Things I Hate 

Feeling sick most days 

How much money I’ve spent and still feel sick most days

The healing culture that keeps coming up with more bogus blocks to healing

“Toxins, energies, emotional traumas”

I hate the word healing

I hate the word healing

I hate the word healing

I hate how she recovered and I can’t

I hate people who run and hike and ski

I hate all babies and all women who have them

I hate that we are ruining our earth and no one talks about that

I hate doctors who charge $350 an hour

I hate supplements

I hate creative resistance

I hate living with pain

I hate fucking getting tired every afternoon

I hate that this has been going on for over ten years

I hate people who try to fix me not knowing ANYTHING

I hate how I complain 

I hate how much I obsess and read and know so much and none of it matters

I hate going to Home Depot

(Actually I like it)

I hate that I don’t trust my protocol

I hate how I’m not resentful about all of it 

I should be

--Lindsay wrote this on her phone this past Saturday when she was on the bathroom floor in agony [she's had Lyme's Disease for a decade]. She gave me permission to share this.

With Lindsay at Northwest Coffee on Laclede

A Poet on Amazon [by Mark]

 Here's a link to Katie Murphy's book, How To Live in Many Times at Once, on Kindle. 

She graduated from SLU in Political Science in 2009.

Advice from Allen [via Mark]

Look in heart; check out your visions with your friends; be bold and careful at the same time; Mind includes both sides of any argument; balance body, feelings, reason and imagination:  ALL 4 working together to make the whole wo/man; read William Blake & Dostoyevsky; listen to old Blues (Leadbelly Ma Rainey & Skip James); learn classical Buddhist-style meditation practice; try everything; “If you see something Horrible, don’t cling to it,” sez Tibetan Lama Dudjon Rinpoche. See Charlie Chaplin Marx Brothers & WC Fields. Read PLATO’s Symposium.  Tell your friends everything.  Give away all your secrets. “Be wise as serpents and gentles as doves.” Feed everybody.  Remember life includes suffering complete change and no ultimate personal identity, neither permanent Self or permanent God. Cheerful!  Help everyone! 

From an interview in the book I am rereading for this class---

Twenty-Five Years Ago Tonight [by Mark]

 

We Are Broken

At last, a little quiet and stillness.  Judy Gallagher and her daughter Sarah brought over the evening’s delicious  dinner. With a candle I had lit, Mev and I sat at the table, she in her wheel chair, and I in one of the rickety chairs I had brought with me from Louisville to New York, Cambridge to Berkeley, Oakland to St. Louis.

I knew Mev did not have her speech machine with her; I didn’t want to go into the bedroom to get it.  I had a negative appreciation for that contraption.  I wanted to see how much we could communicate without it.

The Professor [by Annie]

Last Christmas, my brother and I gave my dad, a retired journalist, a subscription to a website that sends you a writing prompt about your life once a week for a full year.

Dad was keeping up with it diligently until he was diagnosed with cancer a few months into the COVID-19 crisis. He will be heading into the hospital for a stem cell transplant soon, so I decided that I will read what he wrote earlier this year as my companion text to this class.

Here's an excerpt I read this week about being in jail in St. Louis in the 1960s:

Another occasional highlight was the bookmobile, a small bookshelf on wheels that a trustee rolled around to the tiers every week or so. I was one of the only people in our tier who took out books; maybe “took in” would be more accurate. It’s where I became acquainted with some poets, especially Byron, whose poems I still love. I also got a couple novels – one of the Fenimore Cooper books and others, the names of which I can’t recall. The fact that I took books from the library earned me the nickname “The Professor” from a couple inmates.

I also got a copy of the “Communist Manifesto” by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. I read most of it but didn’t care for it — except the end. I memorized my own bastardized version of the “Workers of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains. You have a world to win.”

When asked about the book by some and I recited the above quote as the book’s principal message, several guys started calling me “a Communist,” and not in a derogatory way. It would just be thrown into a conversation: “Cosby’s a communist.”

...

I got out of jail on Aug. 1, 1966, my 18th birthday. The day started with me being told to wrap up my bunk and junk in the sheet from my bed. "Bunk and junk" was what you called your belongings.

I was led from the jail to the courts building through an underground hallway linking the two. I was escorted by Edward Tripp, who at that time was some type of minor official charged with moving prisoners to court.

As we walked, he found it surprising that I was even in jail given that I was a first-time offender. He said had my father shown up at my initial court date and proved he couldn’t afford a lawyer, that the judge likely would have released me on my own recognizance under my dad’s supervision. Unfortunately, I believe that my father knew very little as to how things operated, much like me, and felt that a lawyer would be needed to get me out and he didn’t have the money to hire one.

Tripp also said it was unlikely that I would go to prison but that I should be respectful and straightforward with the judge.

...

“Put your clothes back in the bag, son, and get out of here.” For some reason, I remember those words exactly. So I clutched that bag to my chest and one of the jailers escorted me out of an entrance to Market Street.

I’m not being overdramatic when I say I took a deep breath and damned if it wasn’t cooler and sweeter than I could remember. I just started walking north to Olive Street and hung a hard left, heading west, following the street car tracks. I had no money and couldn’t get on the street car.

I remember walking faster and faster, holding my brown paper bag, breathing so deeply because it really was different air out there. I continued walking, faster and faster, until I hit Sarah Street and saw my dad.

He just looked at me and shook his head, as if to say, “It’s about time” and “where the hell have you been.”

Anyway, that was my birthday and I was free.

“Every Man Should Have His War” [by Mark]

One of the best books I’ve ever read is by Gloria Emerson, Winners and Losers: Battles, Retreats, Gains, Losses and Ruins from a Long War. A major themes in the book is how the Vietnam War affected Americans (or how it didn’t).  Here’s a sample of passages:

Each year that it lasted Americans who took opposite sides on the war seemed to hate each other more than the Vietnamese who opposed us. 37

In 1976 she was given a large black-and-white poster of Ho Chi Minh, sent from Bangkok, which she put up over her desk. The face of the dead Vietnamese so upset one of the older women that it had to be taken down. 53

“What have any of us done to be tired?”  58

The Department of Defense does not give a breakdown of the serious injuries, so no one knows how many blind, how many burned, how many paralyzed, how many amputees they were. 59

Many Americans cannot pronounce the name of the race.

“I hated them,” he said of the Vietnamese. He meant all of them, expect for a few prostitutes. One girl had given him a thin metal bracelet which he still wears. The women gave him decent memories; with them there were lots of laughs, he said. 72

“I think I can be very truthful. I think most people will tell you the same. We realized there was a war on, we thought it was horrible, but actually you don’t realize how horrible it is until it involves one of your own. I think any mother will tell you the same thing. Even the people in Westborough didn’t realize the horrors of the war until Teddy was killed.”  83

More than 750,000 persons were in need of a universal and unconditional amnesty after the decade in Vietnam, the ACLU said, but only 137,000 were eligible under the Ford Plan.

Writing from this past summer (Anne)

 This past summer, with my whole family home, my sister wanted to start a writing club with both of us and our parents. My sister would always come up with prompts or topics for us all to write about, and one week she suggested writing about giving. Responding to that prompt, I wrote about a dilemma I was having at the time about writing letters to people and not getting any back. Liz shared with me some advice she had gotten from Mark when she had a similar dilemma a few years back. (I apologize if I am butchering your advice, Mark). On July 2, 2020, I wrote:

I told Liz that [about my dilemma] and she told me about when she was first writing to Mark and had the same dilemma. What I got from Liz was that Mark said something about how it doesn't matter if it is reciprocated. What matters is that you are sharing and giving. You never know the ripple effect that your giving/sharing will have. 

The advice/inspiration I received from Liz from Mark really stuck with me. After reflecting at that time, I continued to send letters to my friends who don't normally send anything back. And I started an exchange with one of them!

Thank you Mark, for sharing about the ripple effect with Liz, so that I could receive the same advice that helped me with writing. 

"It Happens to All of Us" [Wendy]

I've had the habit of writing in notebooks and practice writing meditation ever since Dr. C's class in 2008. Yet, I move around a lot, and cannot take all those notebooks with me. When my parents sold their house in St. Louis last year, I decided to digitize all of the notebooks that I've stored in their basement. I take pictures of each page and save them onto Day One, a diary app. 

Last month, in preparation for moving out of Saigon and back to Taiwan, I once again was taking photos of the notebooks that I had with me. I want to share this particular prompt from one of Dr. C's previous classes. I believe this was in the fall of 2018, during my year of full-time travel. (And one of the many classes I didn't follow through... 😅

I love re-reading old entries and love the feeling of reading about my own thoughts from a third-person perspective (since I've long forgotten to have written these words). This writing reflected so much angst that I was feeling while I was "living the dream" to travel the world. 

It Happens to All of Us

In the end, we all end the same way. I dunno when I came to this realization, but lately that has been my guiding post in how I live my life. If we all will end the same, then I want to ensure I don't live the same life as everyone else.

Societal pressure happens to all of us as well. The good education, good job, big house, good school district for our kids, etc. Breaking away from it all isn't as easy as one may think. There is always that slight anxiety of, "am I making a mistake?!"

I often ask myself how I'm contributing to the world? Now that I'm free from the golden handcuff, how can I position myself in this world where I'm making a contribution to the human race, to the environment?

It happens to all of us. One day, at an undetermined time and place, our bodies will cease to function. That day can be 70 years from now or tomorrow. None of us has control over that timing. 

What we do have control over is the way that we decide to spend each and every day. What does "living your best life" look like? We will all end the same way one day, but we don't always ask this question.

Yo Yo Meow and other Cool Cats

I'm looking through a journal from 2015-2017 and found a list of famous people with names turned into cat names. A friend helped with creating some of these. I cannot help but laugh out loud reading these names. Hopefully it brings at least a smile to your face to read/say out loud some of these. I'd love any others can think of to add to the list! -Justin

Alfred Hitchcat            Henri Meowen

Henry Kittinger            Feline Dion

Cat Vonnegut               Yo Yo Meow

Andrew Categie           Meowcé

Kitty Cent                    Pussy Elliot

Catboy Slim                Kim Katashian

Marie Purrie                Picatsso

Benedict Cumbercat    Aaron Purr

Paul McCatney

Chapter 3: Ora Dell Graham

    In the 1930’s and 1940’s, the Library of Congress commissioned John A. Lomax to traverse the country, recording American folk music at it’s source.  Thousands of songs were recorded and catalogued as part of the fabric that makes up our national heritage.  

    Nearly 50 years later, Stephen Wade tracked down neighbors, friends, and next of kin to a dozen artists that were recorded.  Part of his project was issuing royalty checks to surviving family - many of whom were just learning about the existence of these recordings.  

From The Beautiful Music All Around Us by Stephen Wade:

Now, forty-six years later, we scoured East St. Louis, Illinois, for a high-grade photocopier able to reproduce Ora Dell’s sole portrait.  A few days before, [Leon] Milton first learned that his aunt had made some recordings.  In the fall of 1940, the year she turned twelve, Ora Dell stood before her classmates in her school auditorium.  As John A. Lomax operated a disc recorder, she performed a handful of songs that she animated with dance steps, hand clapping, and vocal effects.  Three of these numbers, along with the earliest published recordings of Muddy Waters, subsequently appeared on an album of African American blues and game songs issued by the Library of Congress.  This news came as a surprise to Milton.  He listened patiently to the story, one that included a government library that until now he had never heard of.  On our way to another strip mall with possibly a better duplicator than the machine we just tried, his reserve finally gave way. “Why,” he asked heatedly, “would anyone care about a little black girl from Mississippi?”

    This passage broke my heart to read, because of the obvious admiration that Leon showed for his aunt in the introduction of the chapter.  He still kept her photo on the dash of his car, weathered and cracked from decades in the sun.  Folk music is such an important part of who we are and where we came from, but it’s certainly not immune to appropriation.  The previous chapter focused on the song “Rock Island Line” - an immediate memory to me of my granddad’s voice, along with Johnny Cash.  Lonnie Donegan made the tune “famous”, but the archived version was written by an African American’s booster club chapter for the Rock Island Railroad.  The field recording was performed by Kelly Pace, a Black inmate held in Arkansas.

    Having grown up in Mississippi in the wake of Emmett Till, Leon’s question isn’t surprising, but it shows that we’re too unaware of where the roots grow from, for what we currently enjoy - from clothing, to music, to food - the list goes on and on

Ora Dell Graham - “Pullin’ the Skiff”

https://youtu.be/t_6IyLSdDYM

“Shortenin’ Bread”

https://youtu.be/Ax1R_zTugCM

Zen Mind, Writer's Mind [by Mark]

 Here's the latest from Natalie Goldberg!

Books I'm reading (by Sarah M)

 I chose two books to read during this course. One was given to me by a fellow teacher called I Rode a Horse of Milk White Jade by Diane L. Wilson and the other is a book I read while camping a few years ago: The Abundance by Annie Dillard.  

I planned to read them slowly, but blew through the YA novel about horses, Mongolia, young heroes, and listening to the world with our hearts in a morning and part of an afternoon. It was one of those books that just grabbed me for its magic and beauty. 

There's an essay in the Dillard book called "A Writer in the World" and I thought I'd share a few lines with you. I hope you like them.  

Why do you never find anything written about that idiosyncratic thought you advert to, about your fascination with something no one else understands? Because it is up to you. There is something you find interesting, for a reason hard to explain because you have never read it on any page; there you begin. You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment. "The most demanding part of living a lifetime as an artist is the strict discipline of forcing oneself to work steadfastly along the nerve of one's own most intimate sensitivity." Anne Truitt, the sculptor, said this. "Pursue, keep up with, circle round and round your life. . . . Know your own bone: gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw at it still." 

Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality? 

Write about winter in the summer. Describe Norway as Ibsen did, from a desk in Italy; describe Dublin as James Joyce did, from a desk in Paris. Will Cather wrote her prairie novels in New York City; Mark Twain wrote Huckleberry Finn in Hartford, Connecticut. Recently, scholars learned that Walt Whitman rarely left his room. 

Those Old Notebooks [by Mark]

So, seven of you took my SJ class and read N. Goldberg manual on writing down your bones.

Do you still have that notebook?  

Have you ever reread it, in part or all?

Or did you use it, like some Zen Master, for kindling, as you enjoyed sitting before a warm fireplace one chilly winter eve?

One Thing Leads to Another [by Mark]

Z studied with me

In Social Justice class fall 2007

I learned that semester
How much they loved poetry

They kept a notebook of new words
They’d come across and then make the words a part of them

They seemed a soul-mate to Walt Whitman
So I gave them his Poetry and Prose 

That next spring semester
We decided to read poets together

Meet outside at Coffee Cartel

Share favorites, read aloud

Pre-class Era Writing [by Chris]

Digging through an old notebook that I’ve had since college, and this seemed relevant considering our focus on anaphora this past class.  I wrote this maybe a year post-divorce from a high school / college sweetheart.  I had just started dating somebody new - the first new person to me in the past ten or so years.  My religious experiences were taking a more humanist turn, something that still continues today:

The red leaves of an autumn tree...

That is my burning bush.

That is my God speaking to me.

The Southern Cross on my right and the Northern Star on my left...

That is my parting of the seas.

That is my God speaking to me.

Freshly fried chicken and tender, flaky biscuits...

That is my manna from heaven.

That is my God speaking to me.

A harmonious, resonating piano chord...

That is my angelic choir.

That is my God speaking to me.

The kicking and heartbeat through your taught, pregnant skin...

That is my immaculate conception.

That is my God speaking to me.

Finished! [by Mark]

This morning I transferred the last two "threads" of my project Dear Love of Comrades from Facebook to my blog, Hold It All.  It was about two years ago that I walked by the Starbucks at Maryville when Whitman's poem came to me and delivered the name for this compilation of mine, which I described to Rachel Sacks as "a tribute to friendship."

A poem about a student [by Sarah M]

 I wrote this poem last week (in about 30 seconds) right after my first Zoom call with Mark. I think it's the first thing I've written in too long to say, but I'm thankful to this class for making it happen! 

Tiantian (Lily)

Lily thinks differently

She questions colors, thoughts, reasons

She wants a reason 

She wants her own reasons to own her own. 

Stood up [by Mark]

I was expecting  a friend on a perfect summer day sitting outside at Gelateria on South Grand, and he never showed up. I wrote the following while waiting.

With Anandamayi Ma at Gelateria

After meditating way past midnight

I went to my mat and fell asleep

And soon in a dream

Sri Anandamayi Ma and I are having a  tête-à-tête

She looks mid-twenties

She is wearing a tie-dye t-shirt

And is sitting across from me

Outside at Gelateria

The curious passers-by

Might assume she is a medical student

Taking a break from her books

That would account for the light emanating from her

She’s wearing a faint smile

And I’m a little nervous

She obviously knows this too

And tries to put me at ease

A Yeats Favorite [by Annie]

I'm not nearly as knowledgeable about Irish literature as I should be, but I do enjoy the more fantastical Yeats poetry. Here's a personal favorite (highlight my own):

The Stolen Child

W.B. Yeats

Where dips the rocky highland
Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,
There lies a leafy island
Where flapping herons wake
The drowsy water rats;
There we've hid our faery vats,
Full of berrys
And of reddest stolen cherries.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

Where the wave of moonlight glosses
The dim gray sands with light,
Far off by furthest Rosses
We foot it all the night,
Weaving olden dances
Mingling hands and mingling glances
Till the moon has taken flight;
To and fro we leap
And chase the frothy bubbles,
While the world is full of troubles
And anxious in its sleep.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

Where the wandering water gushes
From the hills above Glen-Car,
In pools among the rushes
That scarce could bathe a star,
We seek for slumbering trout
And whispering in their ears
Give them unquiet dreams;
Leaning softly out
From ferns that drop their tears
Over the young streams.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

Away with us he's going,
The solemn-eyed:
He'll hear no more the lowing
Of the calves on the warm hillside
Or the kettle on the hob
Sing peace into his breast,
Or see the brown mice bob
Round and round the oatmeal chest.
For he comes, the human child,
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than he can understand.

A bad photo I took of Innisfree (made famous by the Yeats poem about growing beans and raising bees)

I visited Yeats' grave in County Sligo, Ireland, about 4 days before a school paper on Yeats was due (which I had not yet begun).

Intro from Wendy

In the midst of a major life transition, I am finding much grounding in this class. Last week's session was wonderful and I look forward to many more. 

I took Dr. C's Social Justice class in the spring of '08 at SLU. Since, I've been on a whirlwind of globetrotting journey from the Peace Corps in Cameroon to grad school in London and New York, to a six-ish year stint in Shanghai. Fed up with the corporate grind, my husband and I embarked upon a year of around-the-world travel, followed by a year in Saigon, Vietnam, and finally back to the Motherland a few weeks ago in Taiwan, where I had left at age 12 and immigrated to St. Louis. I've documented much of this journey on my blog, Wanderlust Wendy to both process my experiences and to pay-it-forward with learnings along the way. 

I look forward to the weekly Zoom session to keep me accountable to keep up with the reading and writing. Also, allowing myself to take some time to slow down and reflect. 

Photos with my French husband, Xavier, whom I met in Shanghai. This was during one of our last nights in Saigon, Vietnam.

Both/And [by Mark]

I read Joe Brainard’s classic I Remember  in 2002 as I was finishing up a draft of what was published as The Book of Mev in 2005. In many writing classes I’ve facilitated since 2012, I encourage people to read and enjoy Brainard’s book, and generate some of their own recollections.

A few days ago, I thought of I Remember as I know several friends who are deeply grieving the loss of a family member. At the memorial gathering, people were doing their own oral “I Remember.” The various appointed and spontaneous speakers were awkward, riveting, candid, eloquent, stammering, goofy, hilarious. So many anguished, happy tears were generated in that space.

Hi from the other Sarah

There are an unlimited amount of things I'd rather do than write...which is precisely why I'm taking this class.  My writing muscle is not well exercised.  I certainly cannot write at will, and it seems when we pause to write in class that everyone is inspired to write and write while I'm the first to put down my pen.  The process of writing feels excruciating, as if I'm trying to pull something out of depths that I don't understand how to navigate.  But when I can pull those thoughts out, it feels good.  And I know myself well enough to know that I need to create a space, a structure, a deadline for deliberate writing.  Otherwise I won't do it.

Meanwhile, some of the things I'd rather be doing include....

Run, garden, work, cook, read, be with my family, paddleboard, listen to podcasts and NPR.

Last fall, I visited my daughter, Liz, during her last year at GWU in DC.  We toured the NPR studio together - a mountaintop experience!

Note to a Friend on Back of Ginsberg’s 1977 poem, Grim Skeleton [by Mark]

 Beginning 23rd year proffing this past week

Turned 59, Ginsberg 51 when he “Grim Skeleton” sounded off
Ah, what to do with disasters near and far,
Dave Chappelle should be prez,
Laughter good for soul,
Poetry too,
Taking care of oneself and the beloveds is planetary responsibility,
If only we could be as free as Allen chanting Hare Krishna to Bill Buckley on Firing Line!

Om Sri Andrew Jai Andrew!

The Urgent Necessities When You’re Stuck in One Place [by Mark]

I understand that I can have visitors twice a month—the second and fourth Sunday. However, I understand that everybody—white and colored—can have visitors this coming Sunday. I hope you can find some way to come down. I know it will be a terrible inconvenience in your condition, but I want to see you and the children very badly. Also ask Wyatt to come. There are some very urgent things that I will need to talk with him about. Pleas[e] bring the following books to me: Stride Toward Freedom, Paul Tillich’s Systematic Theology Vol 1 & 2, George Buttrick The Parables of Jesus, E. S. Jones Mahatma Gandhi, Horns and Halo, a Bible, a Dictionary and my reference dictionary called Increasing your Word Power. This book is an old book in a red cover and it may be in the den or upstairs in one of my bags. Also bring the following sermons from my file: “What is Man” “The Three Dimensions” “The Death of Evil” … [He listed fifteen more sermons.] Also bring a radio.

–from Martin Luther King, Jr. to Coretta King, 1960

Cited in Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America during the Kng Years, 1954-63

 

 Hello fellow writers,

I'm Justin (he/him/his). I first met Mark when taking Social Justice at SLU back in the mid 2000s and I deeply enjoyed a few writing classes he led since then. I'm from Cincinnati originally, but mostly I've lived as an adult in St. Louis. I practice (or just dabble!) as a poet, bicycler, and acoustic guitarist. I also listen to music A LOT. 

I spend a little less than a third of my life working for the L'Arche St. Louis community (L'Arche is a network/movement of intentional communities where people of varying abilities share life together, striving for a world where all belong. I do more back end operations work for the community at present, but I love L'Arche locally and globally and have lived in L'Arche homes around the US and a year in Mexico. 

Here are a couple of my favorite L'Arche-inspired videos - these are about Musa from L'Arche Kenya: 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2OZN-Mjon90. 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ST39z3tCvM.

And a more recent video specific to L'Arche in St. Louis: 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xl0o0hhab-c

Looking forward to learning more about you all!

Halloween 2019 with my friend Sarah

Introduction (Sarah)

Hi, everyone! 

My name is Sarah and I’m really excited to be in this class with all of you. I took Mark’s class at SLU in 2002, and seeing his post about this class one night made me remember what it felt like to be in that class reading words together and talking or not talking about them but listening to ourselves and each other and letting things grow. And I thought that seemed like a good place to be right now. So here I am.

Unfortunately, I can’t be virtually present right now. I live in Singapore and teach at a small international school. I teach a class of two grade ten students at that time. (It’s a very small class.) I do think I’ll be able to join for the last two weeks though, when we are on school holiday. My students are mostly from China, Japan, and Korea, and about a third of them are living with guardians here in Singapore and haven’t been home to see their families in nearly a year now. Luckily, we are able to be in school and be with our students, masked and as socially distant as possible, of course. 

This is a picture of me, my husband Brian, and our two kittens. We adopted them at the end of two months in the house during circuit breaker (Singaporean for lockdown), and they have been a real gift! We call them Cardi B. and Lola. Cardi B. loves to be heard. 

Self Introduction (Katrina)

Another SLU grad over here- I took Dr. Chmiel's class in 2010 & graduated in 2011. My first writing class was in 2014, while I was in grad school, & here we are 6-ish years later!

I'm in St. Louis, where I work for Our Lady's Inn. 

I love love traveling, & one of my main life goals is be able to be able to codeswitch effortlessly into another language. Nowhere near there yet! And obviously I love to read- always have, always will. I recently came across this quote from Tolkien in response to criticism of his work being escapist: “Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls? The world outside has not become less real because the prisoner cannot see it. In using escape in this way the critics have chosen the wrong word, and, what is more, they are confusing, not always by sincere error, the Escape of the Prisoner with the Flight of the Deserter.” I feel like this is so salient for this class especially. Lastly (well, lastly enough for a blog intro), I'm loving learning more about the saints. My current saintly buddy is St. Zelie Martin, mother of Therese of Lisieux. What a woman! 

At my cousin Julia's table- one of my very favorite spots on earth

Self-Intro (Chris Wagner)

 Hey, all!

My name is Chris Wagner (he/him).  I graduated SLU in 2008 with a degree in Theological Studies (focusing on theology of the marginalized - feminist theology, theology of the poor, liberation theology, etc.) and a minor in Political Science.  I recently completed a MA in Communication Studies from Eastern Illinois University, focusing on rhetoric/critical cultural studies.

I’ve been back in St. Louis for a little over two years, and currently reside on Arco in the Grove, with my wife Krissy, and my dog, Lennon. He is the goodest boy, and excels at stretching.

I work a sales position for an industrial safety company during the week, and recently made the switch from weekend bartender to weekend line cook.  I’ll begin working at Beast Butcher & Block in the Grove in a couple of weeks, and I’m thrilled - it’s the first “real kitchen” that I’ll have worked in.  To say I love to cook is an understatement - it’s a central way that I show affection to friends and family.  I didn’t really grow up with a strong familial culinary tradition, so I’m exploring what that means for my identity and how I navigate that going forward.

I’m trying to fill my life with more things that facilitate personal growth, and this class came along at the perfect time.  I’m looking forward to reading and writing more, and exploring a bit with you all in the upcoming weeks!

Me, Lennon, and Krissy, celebrating Lennon’s 8th birthday this year

Self Introduction (Annie)

I took Dr. Chmiel's class at SLU many moons ago. After college, I spent a few years living in Galway, Ireland, where I met my now-husband.

Last year, we bought a little house on the street where I grew up in North St. Louis County, not knowing then exactly how much time 2020 would have us spending in said house.

I'm a digital marketing strategist by day and write fiction by night. I've self-published and worked with small presses, mostly young adult fantasy about Celtic myth. My first middle grade novel is being shopped now.

But my current writing projects include ... absolutely nothing. 2020 has done a serious number on me, and this class showed up in my Facebook feed at exactly the right time.

As Natalie Goldberg said: "In the middle of the world, make one positive step. In the center of chaos, make one definitive act. Just write." That's what I'm hoping to do these next 8 weeks.

This is me and my Rottweiler—Australian Shepherd mix, Lucy, in matching pajamas at my birthday party (pre-COVID).

Self Introduction (Anne)

 I am Anne Burkemper, 16 years old, a junior at Ursuline Academy in Kirkwood.

I play tennis for my school in the fall, I was just inducted into NHS, and I am an ambassador for my school.

My hobbies include writing, listening to music, and crocheting.

I started my first job this past summer at Innsbrook as a recreational aide.

I am so excited to be a part of this class, and it is my first class with Mark!

she/her

 

Self-Intro [by Mark]

"Retired" from SLU in 2010-2011, I've been  working at St. Louis Community College and Maryville University as tutor and adjunct, and have been doing my own outside-of-academia classes since 2012.

I published a novel in 2015 (Dear Layla) and  am working on an unfinishable project I call Dear Love of Comrades (which is a phrase I've borrowed from Walt Whitman).

Two  of my current projects are learning Yiddish and reading Hugo's Les Misérables.

I live on Chouteau Avenue in Forest Park Southeast in Saint Louis with my partner Joanie French, who is a Feldenkrais Practitioner. 

This is a photo from 2017 when I visited the Burkempers in Troy, Missouri; from left--Ben, Anne,  Liz, and Sarah.

Safa and the Marine Face to Face in the Parking Lot (Ahimsa/2) [by Mark]

[Note to reader: Safa is a Palestinian-American Muslim who wears hijab.]

Dear Professor

You asked how things are going in grad school

Here’s today’s highlight—

Stupid Shit Civilians Say [by Mark]

 

Stupid Shit Civilians Say [by Mark]

He’d been home a couple of months

Against his better judgment

He said yes he’d come

To his fraternity’s party

Before he left for Iraq

He never drank alcohol

Even with his fraternity brothers

But he wouldn’t drink at the gathering