Upcoming: Spring Yoga & Writing Workshop

I’m looking forward to leading my next mindfulness retreat, a Yoga & Writing workshop with yoga teacher Erin Garvin at Midtown Athletic Club in Rochester, NY on Sunday, April 17th, 2016. Past participants’ comments have highlighted how valuable and restorative they have found these workshops. I love teaching them. 2016 is the fifth year that I’ve taught or co-taught a writing & yoga workshop.

Our day-long retreat will integrate motion and reflection, nurturing spring’s natural inclination towards metamorphosis. All levels of yoga are welcome; no writing experience is necessary. For more information or to register, visit here.  For more on my path of how I came to teach these workshops, click here to read an article in the UMASS Amherst alumni magazine.

   

What If Every Night Were Ladies’ Night? An Interview with Writer Sonja Livingston

International Women’s Day is March 8th and Women’s History Month is March. I’ve always found this both gratifying (to have a day or month set aside) and suspect. To whom do the other days and months belong? And Ladies’ Night at whatever bar or club–who gets the rest of the week? (I think we know who does.) What would it look like to instead consistently foreground and value girls and women?

Creative nonfiction writer Sonja Livingston’s latest book, a fascinating collection of lyric essays entitled Ladies Night at the Dreamland, does just this. She combines history, memory, and imagination to illuminate the lives of enigmatic, little-known American women from the past. Her two previous books (one a collection of essays and another a memoir) are also centered on women and it’s refreshing and necessary to have what is often at the margin (poverty, Western New York, the lives and stories of girls and women) moved to center stage.

I interviewed Sonja, someone I’m enjoying getting to know, over email in March. She lives part of the year in Rochester, NY, and I attended a master class she taught last Saturday, which was terrific (and helped me to get some writing done). Here’s a favorite excerpt from the interview about Sonja’s thoughts on writing. She says:

Paying attention is the main way I feed my writing. There are a thousand quotes about it already, but noticing is everything. In writing, and in life. In fact, I sometimes wonder if my writing is an excuse to make myself notice, and to glom onto people and places without shame.

My full interview with Sonja about her new book is online in the Kenyon Review now. Read more here….

Photographs As Writing Prompts

R took this photo of me by the Bay of Bengal (that’s his finger in the top left corner), when we had a break of a couple of hours between taking part in rituals at various temples in Tamil Nadu with his parents. The flowers in my hair came from these ceremonies. Looking at the vibrant colors now cheers me. Seeing vast Lake Michigan yesterday also made this earlier by-the-shore photo feel resonant two months later.

I’m at the Ragdale Foundation for a few weeks on a fellowship:  it’s a beautiful place to write and work. Yesterday, I met up with a former resident here, Michele Morano, and we walked along the shores of Lake Michigan with her young son. Michele is also a writer, and asked me what I was working on. I mentioned that I had brought with me a couple of folders of essay drafts, but that I couldn’t bear to delve into the messy drafts.

Over tea we ended up talking about our recent (December) trips to India. Michele’s descriptions of Delhi and Varanasi and all the details she mentioned (the ghats, the carnation and rose petals, the getting sick) brought back some of my own memories of my time in Tamil Nadu. I got to thinking about photographs.

A sculpture at a hotel where we had breakfast- showcasing modernity and planned obsolescence; an ancient culture and the Apple logo on a metal apple. The contradictions that are everywhere in India. That’s my mother-in-law off to the side, who always looks elegant in whatever sari she is wearing.

Before leaving for Ragdale, I had an appointment at the computer store to address the fact that I have four different photo libraries- it somehow happened from transferring what was on my previous computers to my current one. I had trouble even finding my recent photos from India. When I located the photos from our India trip, I glanced through most of the photos (I created an album), and it brought back some of my memories, too.

My first overseas travel with R. Again, the colors! Flowers floating in a brass pot of water. I don’t know what those bright red flowers are called. Do you? This photograph reminds me that it took me a few months after our wedding to decide I did in fact want to wear a wedding ring (I never wore a traditional engagement ring), but I knew I wanted toe rings to wear on my second toes, which signify that you’re married.

Look through photos from any particular time in your life and wait for one that suggests a story or that rises from the desktop a bit, that calls to you, talks to you, that you want to spend time with a little more. What made you take the photo in the first place?  What’s the story behind the image and within the person who was moved to capture that image in the first place? If you’re feeling stuck, look at photos. Write about one or two. These three captured my imagination when I looked back at them. I am writing about them now.

Ghazals for Foley

Jim’s comments on my story, Ithaca Is Never Far,” from John Edgar Wideman’s workshop in the spring of 2000. I used the last lines of Jim’s comments in my ghazal. Sometimes, I am grateful for my tendency to hold onto papers that seem to have no particular use.

My second mini-essay is up now on the Kenyon Review Blog, and it’s about a new book of poems, Ghazals for Foley, commemorating the life of journalist James Foley. Jim was my friend and classmate in the MFA program at UMass Amherst. In 2014, he also became the first American journalist killed by ISIS . The book, edited by our friend, Yago S. Cura, includes the beautiful ghazal by Daniel Johnson below. You can buy Ghazals for Foley here from Hinchas Press (all proceeds to support the James W. Foley Legacy Foundation). From the essay:

Whenever I think of ghazals, I think of our former UMass professor, the late Agha Shahid Ali, who is credited with bringing the form back into usage within contemporary American poetry. The ghazal, often about love and longing, is also naturally elegiac in form. As Cura writes in the introduction to the anthology, “Using the ghazal’s form to ‘speak’ with Jim made sense to us, I guess, because of how the repetition crescendos, and because the form has addressed separation, mourning, and loss for centuries.”

Read the whole post here…

Ghazal for James Wright Foley
by Daniel Johnson 

“The idea of walking ahead on my own through the desert as if compelled by a magnet is insane.”
 -James Foley in his Syria journal

Kinetic friend, you moved like light in a mirrored room. Come home.
Raqqa. Damascus. Aleppo. Homs. You rarely took a room. Come home.

We’ll read Borges aloud–burn windfall in the pit–spark a joint.
You’d leave a parting gift, a rebel scarf or Turkish cartoon. Come home.

You crashed your Civic reading Chomsky in Chicago traffic.
Who now will shatter the day into such bright ruins? Come home.

I killed a bat in Olanna’s room, its body the size of a grape.
I laid it in the trash on eggshells like broken stones. Come home.

Roethke in his journals wrote–The cage is open. You may go.
If sunlight bleeds under your cell door, Jim, never the moon. Come home.