Volume V, Issue 50 December 12, 2016 Word of the Week: homeboy Dear ,
I know how busy you are right now. Trust me, I do! But I have something so
great to share that I really don't want you to miss it. So if you don't have time to read this now, please save this email until you have a quiet moment in which to let your heart—and life—be
touched.
(Something else I don't want you to miss, if you're free and would like to come, is this Saturday's Winter Writing Retreat! Details here and also below.)
You may have caught last week's zine, with its photo of my son Dan at the Grand Canyon. Dan, as I said, was on his way to LA, where
his company, SSL, has an office. And while he was in the LA airport, he bought me this mug at a Homeboy Cafe.
And why, you might ask, did he do that? Because I had introduced him to one of the most inspired, God-filled (and funniest) human beings I have ever met, Father Greg Boyle, who founded Homeboy Industries,
which has absolutely rocked the world of thousands of human beings who needed someone to care so they could turn their lives around. Father Greg did, and has.
His success rate with the worst of the worst gang members in East LA (hence my son's initial interest) has been truly phenomenal. Please, oh pretty please, take 20 minutes and 39 seconds to learn about this amazing man I met this past
summer at Chautauqua. He is the real deal. Watch him here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipR0kWt1Fkc.
You can learn a bit more about Father Greg from today's featured
writing, which is an excerpt from a book about him and his work, G-Dog and the Homeboys: Father Greg Boyle and
the Gangs of East Los Angeles, written by Celeste Fremon. I chose a selection from the epilogue that speaks to the latest research on how we can help others to succeed. Spoiler alert: "if you want to help someone heal and get ahead, don’t spend all your efforts trying to control the downside; emphasize the positive, and the negative may dissipate of its own accord."
Father Greg believes in (and speaks eloquently of) the power of community; some of his thoughts on this are below.
And what does this have to do with
you? Well, you may not have ever thought of yourself as having, much less being, a homeboy. But I do hope that you have built around you the kinds of communities that foster what Celeste Fremon calls "resilience." It's what gives us the ability to get back up when we have failed, keep at what we believe is important, keep on until we succeed. Sounds like something we can both put to good use in our writing lives, yes? (Not to mention elsewhere.)
You are always welcome in the WordPlay community, and I don't mind at all if you call me "homegirl." (Yes, homegirls as well as homeboys, have an important place in Homeboy Industries.
Upcoming WordPlay
WINTER WRITING RETREAT
THIS SATURDAY! (Writing as Renewal/Creating New Writing/
Tools for a Writing Life)
Renew and delight yourself. The Winter Writing Retreat is an opportunity to create new pieces of writing and/or possibilities for our lives. Enjoy various
seasonal prompts; they elicit beautiful material that can be shaped into essays, poems, stories, or articles. After a communal lunch, you'll have private time which can be used to collage, work with a piece of writing from the morning, or play with a number of other writing prompts and methods. You'll take home new ideas, new drafts, and new possibilities.
$97 includes lunch and
supplies
WHERE: South Charlotte area. Details will be provided upon registration. WHEN: Saturday, December 17th, 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.
TO REGISTER: To pay with a check via mail, email info@wordplaynow.com for instructions. Click here to pay online, using PayPal.
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UNDER CONSTRUCTION
(Fulfilling Writing Dreams & Goals;
Creating New Writing; Revising & Polishing Your Writing)
This class is designed to fulfill your writing dreams and projects. You’ll set goals and support structures and watch your writing flow! You’ll also get feedback on your work (any genre) and learn revision tools and methods. Each week, writing prompts will generate material for new writing or further a piece in process, whatever your preferred genre. Through examples of accomplished writers, you’ll learn techniques to aid you right where you are in the
process.
WHEN: Tuesday evenings 7:00 to 9 p.m. and Wednesday mornings, 10:00 to noon, starting in January, 2017.
TO REGISTER: If you’re interested in attending, please email us at info@wordplaynow.com for more information.
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GIFT OF MEMOIR
(Preserving Family History/Writing for and about Your Family/The Art of Memoir) Our life stories are a precious legacy. Putting them in writing is a gift
to all who know and love us—they can be treasured and enjoyed for generations to come. It is also a gift to ourselves. As best-selling author Rachel Naomi Remen says in her book Kitchen Table Wisdom, facts bring us to knowledge, but stories bring us to wisdom. If you are interested in writing family and/or personal life stories—those significant tales of adventure, transition, love, loss, and triumph, as well as lovely everyday moments from times past or the present, come learn
specific tools and techniques to retrieve and record them.
WHEN: Thursday mornings, 10:00 to noon, starting in January, 2017.
REGISTER: If you’re interested in attending, please email us at info@wordplaynow.com to be put on the waiting
list.
More WordPlay opportunities here. Featured Writing
an excerpt from
G-Dog and the Homeboys:
Father Greg Boyle
and the Gangs of East Los Angeles
by
Celeste Fremon The Landscape of Change
(from the Epilogue)
Why one person succeeds and another doesn’t has been a topic of research and philosophical argument for centuries. For most of the past twenty years, social scientists primarily measured risk factors to predict whether an individual was likely to overcome a bad past. More recently, however, researchers
have discovered that, in determining the probability of recovery for any population—abused children, drug addicts, paroles, or gang members—it’s far more effective to examine protective factors. This glass-half-full approach is known as “resilience” research or “resiliency” theory.
“In simplest terms,” said Nan Henderson, author of Resiliency in Action: Practical Ideas for Overcoming Risks
and Building Strengths in Youth, Families and Communities, there are six basic human needs, which are also the main factors that build resiliency: caring and support; high expectation for success; opportunities for meaningful participation; positive bonds; clear and consistent boundaries; and good life skills. If people don’t get these needs met in a pro-social way, they’ll get them in an anti-social way—like in a gang. For a kid to find the strength to move out of the gang, these needs
have to be met in a healthy way.”
Dr. Edith H. Grotberg, psychologist and lecturer at George Washington University School of Public Health and internationally known for her research on resilience, puts it another way. “People need to be taught to assess the bumps in the road and know how to deal with them,” she says. “A few years ago, the government started putting money into research in this
area, because they finally realized that resiliency is something we can teach. And when it isn’t learned either in the family or elsewhere, it requires that the larger community step in. Otherwise we’ve got trouble.” In basic terms, resilience theory suggests that a successful life is best achieved by adding to the good, protective, and generative elements in a person’s existence instead of
only attempting to subtract the negative or risky elements. In other words, if you want to help someone heal and get ahead, don’t spend all your efforts trying to control the downside; emphasize the positive, and the negative may dissipate of its own accord….
Although Greg arrived at his methods through instinct and experience rather than research, the tenets of resilience theory are
nearly identical to the principles that the priest has practiced for a long time, at first on his own, now on a larger scale with Homeboy Industries. Yet even his thinking on the subject has evolved. “I used to say that the caring adult who pays attention is the most important factor to help a kid succeed,” he says. “But now I’ve come to believe that the necessary context for that attention is community—meaning a place that reminds you of your goodness and your talent each day. That’s
what I think we do here at Homeboy. We provide a place of ‘no-matter-what-ness,’ a place of unconditional love. Ideally it’s not just a person who offers that, it’s a community of feeling and connection and kinship that becomes a touchstone that you can return to when you hit life’s inevitable difficulties. It’s community that helps a kid discover the kid who will be able to withstand the obstacles life throws at him and be
okay.”
Father Boyle and his homies
Photo courtesy of http://sunnyreport.net
WordPlay Now! Writing
Prompt This is WordPlay—so why not revel in the power and
potential of one good word after another? This week, it's "homeboy."
PROMPT: Write about a "homeboy" experience in your life (or one of your character's) in which being a member of a loving community helped you to be resilient in the face of a challenging
time/circumstance.
MAUREEN RYAN GRIFFIN, an award-winning poetry and nonfiction writer, is the author of Spinning Words into Gold, a Hands-On Guide to the Craft of Writing, a grief workbook entitled I Will Never Forget You, and three collections of poetry, Ten Thousand Cicadas Can't Be Wrong, This Scatter of Blossoms and When the Leaves Are in the Water. One of her long-held dreams came true in July of 2015 when Garrison Keillor read one of her poems on The Writer's Almanac. She believes, as author Julia Cameron says, "We are meant to midwife dreams for one another."
Maureen also believes that serious "word work" requires serious WordPlay, as play is how we humans best learn—and perform. What she loves best is witnessing all the other dreams that come true for her clients along the way. Language, when used with
intentionality and focus, is, after all, serious fuel for joy. Here's to yours! |
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