The WordPlay Word-zine Volume VII, Issue 27 July 9, 2018 Word of the Week: confirm Dear ,
I loved Mary Ellen Lough the moment I met her at the John Campbell Folk School, and, as I do with so many of my WordPlayers, I occasionally check out one of her Facebook posts when
it shows up in my feed. (Mary Ellen is the dark-haired, sassy-looking writer to my right.)
When I came across this week's
featured writing on Mary Ellen's page, I immediately messaged her to ask if I could share it with you. When you read it, you'll see why. I am such a sucker for synchronicity stories! And such a believer in the "leap and the net will appear" approach. (Well, actually, the “take ‘turtle steps’ and the net will appear” approach. I'm a
bit terrified of heights.)
courtesy of https://twitter.com/marthabeck
Over and over, when I, and many, many others I've discussed this with, have truly committed to achieving a dream, we've experienced some kind of aid ("material assistance"), often from an unforeseen source. As mountaineer William
Hutchison Murray puts it in his book The Scottish Himalayan Expedition, written in 1951: Until one is committed there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas
and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favour all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man
could have dreamt would have come his way. I have learned a deep respect for one of Goethe’s couplets: Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.
And we've also experienced confirmation that we're on the right path, in surprising, sometimes humorous, occasionally stunning ways that seem
nothing short of miraculous. I find Mary Ellen's story below a jaw-dropper, and I bet you will, too.
The trick is, you have to be "moving" so that "Providence moves too" AND you have to be paying attention. I do my best to write down—and
share—my synchronicities and confirmations, no matter how small they are, because that helps me to notice them. (For example, how cool is it that when I went looking for a way to let you know that I learned the term "turtle steps" from Life Coach Martha Beck, her
VERY LATEST Twitter post popped up in my search?) For some reason, acknowledging these confirmations seems to make them multiply.
May you and your dreams be confirmed abundantly this week, this month, this year, and always, !
Love and light,
Maureen
Upcoming WordPlay
GIFT OF MEMOIR WRITING PERSONAL AND FAMILY STORIES (Preserving Family History; Writing for and about Your Family; The Art of Memoir)
NOW TAKING REGISTRATIONS FOR FALL 2018! 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.
* For the benefit of participants, an audio recording of the class will be made each week so that participants are able to listen
to classes they miss and/or review material covered at any convenient time and place. These recordings are available throughout the class session, along with all handouts, in a shared Dropbox folder.
WHERE: Covenant Presbyterian Recreation Center, 1000 East Morehead Street, Charlotte, 28204. Click here for map. WHEN: Thursday mornings, 10:00 a.m. – noon., starting in September, 2018. COST: $285 TO
REGISTER: Please email us at info@wordplaynow.com to start the registration process by filling out a short "Clarity Tool" to share your writing dreams and goals and where you are in the process (anywhere you are is a perfect place to begin).
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UNDER CONSTRUCTION
NOW TAKING REGISTRATIONS FOR FALL 2018! 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.
* For the benefit of participants, an audio recording of the class will be made each week so that participants are able to listen to classes they miss and/or review material covered at any convenient time
and place. These recordings are available throughout the class session, along with all handouts, in a shared Dropbox folder.
WHERE: Covenant Presbyterian Recreation Center, 1000 East Morehead Street, Charlotte, 28204. Click here for map. WHEN: Wednesday mornings from 10:00 a.m. – noon, starting in September 2018. (Other class time/day of the week may be available.) COST: $435 TO REGISTER: Please email us at info@wordplaynow.com to start the registration process by filling out a short "Clarity Tool" to share your writing dreams and goals and where you are in the process (anywhere you are is a perfect place to begin).
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EVERY PICTURE HOLDS A STORY - WEEK 8 Writing Class at Chautauqua
Would you enjoy
using favorite photographs and other visual images as springboards to write fiction, nonfiction, and/or poetry, and/or capture family stories? Then come learn some fun, easy methods to get started. We’ll also look at some ways successful writers have used images to inspire their words. If you like, bring your own pictures and photographs of things you’d enjoy writing about. A variety of images will be provided, too.
COURSE NO: 1710 WHEN: Monday, August 13th – Wednesday, August 15th, 2:00 – 4:00 p.m. LOCATION: Turner 105, Chautauqua Institution. 1 Ames Ave, Chautauqua, NY
14722. COST: $85 TO REGISTER: To register online, please click this link to be taken to the Chautauqua Institution website.
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WRITING OUR WAY TO HAPPINESS - WEEK 9 Writing Class at Chautauqua
Come explore time-tested ways writing can increase your happiness level. This class will jumpstart your pen and provide inspiration and knowledge about the process of creative writing, whether your genre is nonfiction, fiction, or poetry. Ideal for beginners, and those interested in expanding their writing -for personal growth or for publication.
COURSE NO: 1712 WHEN: Monday, August 20th – Thursday, August 23rd, 3:00 – 5:00 p.m. LOCATION: Hultquist, 201B, Chautauqua Institution. 1 Ames Ave, Chautauqua, NY 14722. COST: $99 TO REGISTER: To register online, please click this link to be taken to the Chautauqua Institution website.
WordPlay Success Story "I felt like Maureen saw me deeply and offered witness to my dreams." Mary Ellen is a Poetic Medicine facilitator & single mother living with five children in an old farmhouse in southern
Appalachia. She is also a world traveler, community organizer, activist, gardener, musician, and writer. Mary Ellen teaches poetry as a practice of wholeness and path of integration everywhere from the VA hospital, homeless shelters, substance abuse centers, birth centers, public schools, universities, and conferences to an old converted barn out in the mountains where a small group of people gather around a wood stove with tea in winter.
She is the creator of A Year of Poetry and Healing online course, which she also teaches to groups of women locally in Asheville. She was recognized as the 2016 Asheville Resilient Woman Leader of the Year, and has been recognized for humanitarian work in poetry by two of
North Carolina's Poet Laureates, Joseph Bathanti and Jaki Shelton-Green.
You can check out Mary Ellen's website here: http://maryellenlough.com/
Mary Ellen's online course, A Year of Poetry and
Healing, is open for registration through September: https://poetryandhealing.pathwright.com/library/a-year-of-poetry-and-healing/72859/about/ What Mary Ellen says about WordPlay When I showed up at Maureen’s week-long class at the John C. Campbell Folk School, I was at a crossroads in my life. I had been teaching poetry therapy to veterans with PTSD off and on
for a few years after going back to school for poetry as a single mother of five. But I didn’t have the faith that I could support myself off of it, and so I had been working in local food policy as well. I was exhausted and pulled in two directions. I had all but given up on poetry as a livelihood. I had spent the month before the class working on a memoir that I had hoped would give me some foothold back into writing, and it had renewed my sense of myself as a writer, but not the clarity I
needed moving forward. And the manuscript itself seemed to quarantine me more deeply into a place of not-knowing.
Maureen encouraged me to take bold steps in the direction of my
identity and calling as a writer. To believe in it as if it were true, and to make a plan and take solid steps in that direction. I felt like Maureen saw me deeply and offered witness to my dreams. When she said, “We are here to midwife each other’s dreams,” I felt a renewed courage to answer the call of my life as a writer and teacher, even if I couldn’t see how it would work out.
The actual day when Maureen gave us the prompt to write strong intentions for our lives as writers, and I wrote that "I am fully supported financially, emotionally, and spiritually to write my book," I received a phone call that I had been chosen as a Woman Leader of Resilience and
was being sent a check for $1,000. Those kind of miracles and confirmations have been the path and road I have walked on ever since.
I made the leap of faith to give up my work in
Food Policy, and began devoting myself to building my poetry career, and within 8 months was supporting myself solely off of poetry and teaching. I have truly felt the road rising to meet me, and my calling to bring poetry as healing work to the world, and feel supported in all I do. I am thankful to Maureen as a mentor and teacher, and feel her presence with me as part of my “host of saints and angels” as I continue forward in faith and creating a frontier creative life and
identity.
A story about miracles (my favorite kind of story) by
Mary Ellen Lough Last night. I was sitting in an empty
converted Super 8 motel room that opens out in to a courtyard. 250 veterans experiencing homelessness live there and I was getting ready to teach my first poetry class at a large conference table in the room. I had spread out my poems. I was nervous, though I had been there a few times before and arrived early this week to have dinner with the men and begin building relationships. The last time I was there I met a young rapper who was very enthused about my class. He works in a sorting facility
for secondhand goods.
Last night, he was maybe the fourth person to come in and I was distracted as I talking to someone. When I looked down,
there was a huge blue book in front of my seat. It said World of Poetry Anthology on the cover, but it looked more like an encyclopedia. "I saw this and thought of you," the young veteran said. I was touched, and told him so. I assumed he found it while sorting, and was happy that poetry was on his mind enough for him to pull it out of the bins. I opened the book and recognized it as an outdated type of scam poetry publication book, where you can send in $25 and if your poem is chosen
it becomes "published"—when in reality everyone who sends in the money gets published. Then you can pay more for a copy of the book.
As I opened the book, a long forgotten memory drifted back that when I was 12 years old, I had sent in a poem I had written about the Berlin Wall to just such a "contest." (My poem had won an essay contest
on the Berlin Wall. I had read on the radio and been given a bona fide piece of the Berlin Wall wrapped in plastic like a fortune cookie. I felt kind of famous.) When the book had come, and I realized it was kind of a sham, I was disappointed, and forgot about it entirely. And maybe forgot about my dreams of a poetry career as well at that point.
Flash back to last night. A few more veterans had wandered in to the room. A thought occurred to me and I flipped to the back of the book, dated 1991, and went through the many names in alphabetical order. And there it was. Mary Ellen Lough. I opened the book to "And the Walls Came Tumbling
Down" - in one of the most obscure books EVER, which was just placed in front of me with no foreknowledge by a young veteran with whom I'd had a five-minute conversation in a converted Super-8 lobby for the homeless two weeks prior. My astonishment never left me, well after I read them the poem aloud to their cheering.
Boons? Omens? That the world knows me. That it has put me on this path? It wants me to be right here doing this work. During the class, the young man went between silence and abruptly getting up to pace the room. When I would check in with him, the other veterans would say, "He's just being
quiet, and he is NEVER quiet—so you should be thankful and amazed that the poetry is working."
Before he left, he asked me, "Is this going to heal me? Can poetry heal me? Because I go to church and pray and pray and pray but nothing ever helps." I told him I didn't know the answer to his question, but I had been in a similar place, and at some point I switched my prayer from "help me help me help me" to "show me the way." And I come back to that over
and over. It begins to create a space for possibility with our words. And that's also what poetry does. In reading and writing, sometimes we see or feel a way open that we didn't know was there before.
Towards the end of this past spring, when I was working three jobs, completely exhausted, and trying to get this poetry thing all the way up on its feet but too scared to quit one of my jobs—I came in to my waitressing job one morning and began taking
the chairs down from the tables before the restaurant opened. On the first table, as I lifted a chair down, there was a small olive green plastic soldier figurine in a yoga pose—tree pose. AH. I said. Well played, clever world. And the small plastic meditating soldier now sits on my
desk.
Note from Maureen: Mary Ellen ends this powerful story of being confirmed with these words: "So, I'm just
going to leave this poem here. Because Bukowski knew" followed by the text of Charles Bukowski's poem "The Laughing Heart," which you can read here. I highly recommend it, as both poetry and an avenue
of healing.
Again, you can sign up for Mary Ellen's online course, A Year of Poetry and Healing, is open for registration through September: https://poetryandhealing.pathwright.com/library/a-year-of-poetry-and-healing/72859/about/
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 "confirm."
PROMPT: Create a story, scene, poem, essay, article, etc. that features a confirmation of any kind. (Yes, even a confirmation of a doctor's appointment counts, if that's what works for you.)
This is a great opportunity for you to write down one of your own synchronicity stories from any time in your life. (Sometimes we only recognize that we received this kind of confirmation a while after the fact.) And it's also fun to make up (imagine) synchronicities, like Mary
Ellen's poem resurfacing in such a surprising way so many years later at such an auspicious time. Sure, truth can be stranger than fiction, but it isn't always.
It's fun to play with prompts in community with fellow writers, and to be able to share the results when
you're done. You can find out about WordPlay classes, workshops, and retreats here. 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.
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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