Volume VI, Issue 36 September 4, 2017 Dear ,
I hope
you had a great Labor Day weekend! I spent much of mine laboring—but between WordPlay work and housework, it's been sweet labor. And the sweetest was tending, and cleaning up after, my two grandsons, who came to visit for the holiday.
Harry, at 16 months, is a mess-maker in constant motion. And yet, so sweet, and
definitely his Grammy's grandchild. "Look, Mom," his mom said, pointing—he'd scrambled up to the couch and helped himself to some time with a good book all by himself.
There are so many good and worthwhile kinds of labor, including volunteering, as so many people are doing now to help the victims of Hurricane Harvey, and writing, especially writing that brings more good to the
world.
Today's featured WordPlayer, Amy Lefkof, routinely engages in both these labors. I am pleased and honored to feature her today. Her essay, "When No Resistance is Resistance to Hate," is thought-provoking and heartwarming. Enjoy!
Amy's "When No
Resistance is Resistance to Hate" was recently published in a journal you may want to submit to: Tiferet (tiff-éh-ret) is a "non-sectarian, non-dogmatic publication and community at the nexus of literature and spirituality" that publishes "high-quality poetry, prose, and art that further meaningful dialogue about what it is to be humane and conscious in today’s often divisive world." Amy wrote about the theme "resistance." Tiferet's next theme is "hope." They're looking for up to two hundred words of
prose on this "timely, powerful word." Click here for guidelines. The deadline is September 15, 2017.
May all your labors be
love-filled,
Maureen
Upcoming WordPlay
THE GIFT OF MEMOIR: WRITING
PERSONAL AND FAMILY STORIES
Starts this Thursday!
2 spots left!
(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.
* 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. September 7 and 21
October 5, 19 and 26
November 9 and 30
December 14 COST: $275
TO REGISTER: If you’re interested in
attending, please email us at info@wordplaynow.com for instructions on how to register.
-----------------------------------------------
UNDER CONSTRUCTION:
YOUR WRITING
Starts next Wednesday!
1 spot left!
(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.
* 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, 10:00 a.m. – noon. September 13, 20 and 27
October 4, 11, 18 and 25
November 1, 8 and 29
December 6 and 13 COST: $425 TO REGISTER: If you’re interested in attending, please email us at info@wordplaynow.com to be put on the waiting list.
----------------------------------------------- EVERYTHING YOU ALWAYS WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT POETRY
* But Were Afraid to Ask
One week from today!
There are at least
ten thousand ways to write a poem! In this lively presentation about the art and craft of poetry based on Maureen’s latest book of poetry, Ten Thousand Cicadas Can’t Be Wrong, participants will learn how content, sound and form work together, and get to try their hand at the process, and will also have the opportunity to ask every question they’ve ever had about poetry.
TO REGISTER: To register, visit the South County Regional Library registration page here. -----------------------------------------------
FALL WRITING RETREAT
2 spots left!
Renew and delight yourself. The Fall Writing Retreat is an opportunity to create new pieces of writing and/or new 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, September 23rd, 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.
* We’ve also scheduled our Winter
Writing Retreat for Saturday, December 16th and if you’re interested in registering for both, we’ll bundle them at a 10% discount. Your cost for the two retreats would be $175. If you’d like to register for both retreats just click this link to be taken to
PayPal.
More WordPlay opportunities here. WordPlay Success
Story
"What Maureen has helped me learn is the craft of storytelling."
Meet Amy
Lefkof
Amy Lefkof is a feminist, mother, writer, caregiver, and advocate for refugees. A graduate of Southern Methodist University, she received her law degree from Yale Law School. Amy clerked for United States District Judge
Robert L. Carter, and subsequently practiced insurance and securities litigation at the Wall Street law firm of Cahill Gordon & Reindel. Amy has contributed to the Charlotte community in the areas of the arts, access to justice, and education. Amy has served on the board of the McColl Center for Art + Innovation, Temple Beth El, and on the board of Legal Services of Southern Piedmont (LSSP), which provides free legal services to indigent persons in Western North Carolina. Amy conceived and
successfully organized for LSSP its first Justice for All Luncheon fundraiser for non-attorney members of the community. In the area of education, Amy has served as Co-Chair of the Shalom Park Freedom School (SPFS), a summer literacy program in Charlotte affiliated with Marion Wright Edelman’s Children’s Defense Fund. Presently, Amy co-chairs the Jewish Community Refugee Initiative and is enrolled in the MFA program in Creative Non-Fiction at Queens
University.
Recently published works include A Second Chance with Wynn in SMU’s Women and Gender’s Studies Network, and When No Resistance is Resistance to Hate in Tiferet - Literature, Art and the Creative Spirit. A poem, A Woman’s Battle Cry: Battle of Fallujah, is scheduled to be published in Issue 77 (July 2018) of Kaleidoscope.
What Amy says about WordPlay
I’ve called my
mother ‘Flo’ ever since my first women’s studies class in college, where I learned that the terms “mother” and “father” established a hierarchical relationship within the family that empowered my parents and subjugated me – the “daughter.” So it was to the home of Flo and Larry that I returned that first college summer and ever since.
That was the first paragraph of a personal
essay entitled “A Mother by Any Other Name,” published in the Arkansas Women’s Journal in 1995 for Mother’s Day. It was the first piece I ever had published, and, like most of my pieces, it’s about some aspect of domestic life, the connection among people —usually with a nod to spirituality or humor.
Fast forward past two decades —filled mainly with childrearing and community activism —and I
enroll in Maureen’s Under Construction writing class to help me write what some call a divorce memoir, what I call a journey back to self. It is a safe space to write: a group of writers who each have a story to tell, whether through fiction or non-fiction or poetry. Each with her own voice and style. Each with a caring voice when they workshop my pieces.
Maureen’s guiding principle reflects the
truth found in Natalie Goldberg’s craft book Writing Down the Bones: details are important – all of them. The stories of our lives and the lives of those who touch us are worth preserving. So I write about my Aunt Shirley’s butterfly clips that hold back her wispy hair as she cups a well-worn stone and pushes her walker towards her son’s headstone (the son whose weight matched his age when he starved himself to death at 59), where the lettering on the tombstone is etched deeply. And
even though my aunt doesn’t recall what university her son attended, she lets the small gathering of family know that she remembers he was a good son.
Maureen stresses that our writing should invoke all five senses – let the reader hear, see, feel, taste, and smell. Raise a question. Make sure your voice is consistent throughout the piece.
When Maureen edits my work – as either part of workshopping or a one-on-one session (she’s even available to do that sort of editing by phone) she always wants me to read aloud the piece, or at least the first few paragraphs. She’s interested in my voice as a writer, the feeling I demonstrate towards my subject, how one sentence flows or doesn’t flow into the next. It’s a habit I now employ when I read my work aloud to
myself.
I appreciate Maureen’s warm-up craft exercises where she tells us to write down three of our favorite words and then compose a piece with them. I remember writing down “creampuff” —a word from an elementary school textbook. Maureen’s goal: recognize that the connotations and sounds of words are important —the lyrical element. As writers, we need to listen to our words and the words of other writers (borrowing and scribbling down favorite phrases) to understand how sound and sense are intertwined even if we are not writing poetry. Genres blur and we may find lessons in the other genres that can make our own work richer and layered.
Maureen has us explore the
length of our sentences by asking us to find our favorite long sentence and bring it to the next class. A tense or emphatic situation is best conveyed by a short sentence. Nailed down. Bad dog. Ah, so the spondee metrical unit we learned in high school poetry class really is relevant to writing!
Because Maureen is interested in the writer’s soul, not just the work product, she had us go around
the group and choose a word that would guide us for the semester. One writer chose “beginning” – she wanted to start over, fresh. I, going through a painful divorce, chose “resilience.” Every class thereafter, Maureen would ask us to check in with ourselves. Were we living up to our guiding word?
I appreciate how good literature uplifts us by informing us about the human condition, and I know
how to write clear sentences because I was an English major and a lawyer in my last life. But what I want to become is a good storyteller. What Maureen has helped me learn is the craft of storytelling. With Maureen’s help, I was accepted into Queens University’s MFA program in Creative Non-Fiction. Featured Writing When No Resistance is Resistance to Hate by Amy
Lefkof
I, an American Jew whose
grandparents came from Suwalki and Lodz, places where Jews wouldn’t think of resisting, take Ali and Hajer into a bagel shop. I tell the owner that these teens are Iraqi refugees, that their father was a translator for US troops, that this will be their first bagel shmeared with cream cheese. When we get up to leave, the owner gives them a dozen bagels. On the house. It’s almost closing time. There’s no resistance on their part. The teens taste
kindness.
A dozen Bhutanese, ready for an informal ESL lesson, sit on a picnic blanket laid out on the lawn of their apartment complex. Mimicking me, one woman says, I like red M & M and pops a red one in her mouth. I like blue M & M says a pierced-nose woman letting the blueness melt in her mouth, not in her hands. I like yellow says an older woman with few
teeth. Preliterate in their own language, these refugees find pencils difficult to master; they don’t resist a picnic blanket and candy.
Zainab and Omar, Kurdish refugees, offer me a home-cooked meal—chicken with unfamiliar spices. I don’t resist. I savor the new tastes.
~ Published in Tiferet - Literature, Art and the Creative Spirit
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
"labor."
PROMPT: Write about a labor of love of any kind: physical, mental, emotional, spiritual. Or any combination!
Start with an individual person (maybe even you) or character, and brainstorm a list of "labors of love."
Pick one, and bring it to life on the page in an essay, scene, story, or poem.
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! |
|
|
|
