Volume V, Issue 51 December 19, 2016 Word of the Week: squared Dear , This Word of the Week, and today's subject line, are inspired by an essay by Randolph Varney called (no surprises here) "Love, Squared" that I read in a book by WordPlayer Laurel Hunt, whom you'll meet below.
Randolph's title comes from the twin kittens he adopted, but it is also a
wonderful metaphor for what love does for us and in us: it multiplies by itself. (And sometimes by even more, as with the Grinch's heart.)
For many of us, our pets hold a special place in our hearts. It's been twenty years since I snapped this photo of our brand-new kitten Sam-I-Am (I just couldn't resist popping him in one of our "stockings hung by the chimney with care"), and it still makes me smile.
When we lost Sam-I-Am twelve years later, I brought a foundling feline with the loudest purr I'd ever heard home from our
vet and dubbed him Sir Winston Kitten Griffin. (Winston for short; he's purring beside me at this very moment as I type.) And not long after, our daughter became a "mom" to two ginger kittens, whom she named Rex and Jerry. It was triple trouble every time they came to visit!
Laurel’s publications include articles in The Examined Life Journal, Pet Life Magazine, Purina Rally to Rescue Magazine, Animal Sheltering Magazine, Association of Human-Animal Bond Veterinarians Newsletter, StoryCircle.org, and numerous blog posts, and I really admire her for these. I also admire her
for creating the two pet "angel" anthologies listed above, both filled with stories of pet love and loss. I'm grateful she allowed me to choose a story from one of them to share with you. I hope you enjoy the excerpt below from "Love, Squared" as much as I do.
May love be multiplied in your life this season and always,
Upcoming WordPlay
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. WordPlay Success Story
"Maureen created a safe space for our stories to emerge. There were tears and laughter, support and encouragement."
Meet Laurel Hunt
Dogs are my muses. Following the loss of my two beloved dogs Marmaduke, a Great Dane-Mastiff mix, and Molly, a Flat-coat Retriever, to cancer, I was inspired to create a tribute to them. Thus began a journey to
find poems and essays that spoke to pet loss. I rummaged through musty old books and tattered magazines at countless flea markets, estate sales, dog shows, and book fairs. What started as a simple notion to pay tribute to my dogs became Angel Pawprints: Reflections on Loving and Losing a Canine Companion (Hyperion, 2000). At the request of cat lovers (including my editor) I also compiled Angel Whiskers: Reflections on Loving and Losing a Feline Companion (Hyperion, 2001).
My mission is to honor the enduring bonds that we form with pets, to acknowledge the deeply felt grief when we lose them, and to celebrate the ways in which our animal companions enhance our lives and our health.
Prior to retirement, my career included marketing communications, proposal writing, and investor relations for several public corporations, and fundraising for a large hospital, but my first love is writing about dogs.
My current canine inspirations are Alex and Baker, Welsh Springer spaniels, and Rosie, a yellow lab. We live in Tryon,
North Carolina surrounded by horse farms and woods. Baker is a registered therapy dog. Together, we visit hospital and nursing home patients. It’s the highest paying, non-paying job in the world!
I’m currently working on a memoir of caregiving and lessons in letting go, inspired by humans and canines I have loved and lost. The foremost lesson: keeping a grateful
heart.
What Laurel says about
WordPlay When
I discovered WordPlay offerings, the Coastal Writing Retreats intrigued me. Expansive beaches, warm fall sunshine, and opportunity to focus on writing in a supportive group setting promised to be the perfect escape from the stress of a demanding job and caregiving responsibilities for my elderly parents. I had generated rough drafts of a memoir, but it was a mishmash of chapters and scenes that would take time and focus to winnow into a cohesive
story.
Upon retirement, my work colleagues presented me with a “scholarship” for the November WordPlay “Gift of Memoir” Coastal Writing Retreat. This would be the perfect opportunity to revisit the memoir draft. The loss of my parents in 2015 and my husband in 2016 served as a reminder not to postpone fulfilling my dreams. What a gift the retreat turned out to
be!
I’d attended many writing workshops but never a retreat, and didn’t know what to expect. Maureen set a nurturing tone from the outset, gently encouraging each of us to use the time however we wanted. If walking on the beach or holing up in our room with a laptop best served our writing, we had permission to do that. We devoted our time together to exercises from Maureen’s wonderful book,
Spinning Words into Gold, an inspiring and essential resource for any writer’s bookshelf. As we filled our notebooks with scenes and stories in response to the prompts, a kind of magic happened. Maureen created a safe space for our stories to emerge. There were tears and laughter, support and encouragement. We uplifted each other as we shared the pain of loss, the challenges of new pathways in life, and the joy of finding purpose and renewal. We experienced community, so necessary to
the solitary writing life. We touched each other’s hearts.
By the end of the weekend I had a clearer vision for my memoir, fresh inspiration for the process, and a road map for next steps. I learned tools for generating new work and ways to keep track of work in progress. I am deeply grateful for the retreat experience, whose lessons will continue to unfold for years to come. Truly a
gift!"
Featured Writing an excerpt from
"Love, Squared"
by
Randolph Varney
as shared
in
Angel Whiskers: Reflections on Loving
and Losing a Feline Companion
edited by
Laurel Hunt
“Why don’t you take them both?” Gary, my downstairs neighbor, had just the two kittens left, twin sisters from a littler of six, and he was trying to convince me that two were no more trouble than one. “If they weren’t twins, I could see them going to different homes,” he said as he held them up for my inspection. “Look, they really belong
together. Like a matched set. You don’t want to break up the set, do you?”
I had to admit, it would be a shame to separate them, and besides they were both really beautiful—palm-sized puffs of black and white fur, soft green eyes, and pink paw pads, front and back. So, one in each hand, I took them upstairs to my tiny three-room apartment. It
was April 1977. T.S. Eliot said that cats name themselves, and that first afternoon with the kittens I understood what he meant. I took a long critical look at the bigger one, and with her black and white markings, it was obvious that she should be Domino, as simple as that....
{From "that first day" when Randolph "set up a feeding station in the kitchen near the hot water heater, installed the litter box behind the clawfoot tub in the bathroom, and laid in all the accoutrements indoor cats require..." until sixteen years later when Randolph and his partner John first lost Domino, and then, a short time later, her twin
sister Bamboo (named for the way she, as a kitten, would "scramble up into the pot [of exotic bamboo] and stalk some unseen adversary in a bonsai version of jungle warfare"), Domino and Bamboo were a part of the family, and their absence made "the house a pretty lonely place" for a few months. Then Randolph and John went to "a group grief counseling session at the San Francisco SPCA, where [they] listened to terribly
sad tales of loss...."}
As we sat and listened, John and I had the same thought: We had been so lucky to have 16 good years with Domino and Bamboo, and, by comparison, their deaths had been peaceful.
That very night we heard about the San Francisco SPCA's kitten foster program and decided that, although we weren't ready emotionally to get another cat, at least we could provide a temporary home for a homeless feline family. So for that whole spring, our house was never without a mom cat and her kittens. We'd keep them until the kittens were ready for adoption, bring them back to the SPCA, and exchange them for another
homeless family. In all, we fostered three consecutive cat families. It turned out to be good nurturing for the cats and great therapy for us.
By this time we were feeling that it was time for us to settle down with a new family. From the last litter we fostered, we picked out two winners for adoption: Skipper, an adorable cross-eyed,
buck-toothed tabby, and Pepper, his aloof but gorgeous tortoise-shell sister.
We know that Skipper and Pepper will never replace Domino and Bamboo, just as no two cats will ever replace Skipper and Pepper when their time comes. If nothing else, all our cats have
taught us one important truth: Unlike people, they never give a thought to their mortality until, maybe, in the last few minutes before they check out. Instead, cats live their lives as the poet Blake described it—they catch the joy as it flies.
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 "squared."
PROMPT: Love begets love, don't you think? Write about a time that you, or one of your characters, were inspired by the love of someone/something to extend love to someone/something else, as Randolph describes in "Love,
Squared." 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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