Volume X, Issue 22
November 3, 2021
Word of the Week: through
Dear ,
If we're lucky, we have people in our lives who help us make it through, and I am very lucky. I met my friend Vivé Griffith some three decades ago at a writing retreat in the North Carolina mountains led by the incomparable Irene Blair Honeycutt, who, among the many gifts she's given me as a writing teacher, mentor, and friend, was
pairing Vivé and I together to ride to and from the retreat. Given I was driving my husband's diesel VW wagon, which maxed out at 35 miles an hour on the steep, windy roads, we had plenty of time to talk. And to become fast friends, which we still are.
Not long ago, I had the opportunity to visit Vivé in Austin, Texas, while visiting my 18-year-old granddaughter who recently lost her mother to Covid as well as a dear college friend who was diagnosed with brain cancer in March.
How good it felt to pose in front of Vivé's poetry box, from which neighbors and passersby can take a copy of a thoughtfully selected poem of the week, and celebrate the way that poetry has brought, and kept, us together. And how lovely that the poem in the box this week was Raymond Carver's "Late Fragment," a poem Irene had shared with us way back when at her mountain writing retreat.
"Late Fragment" is also the poem I read at Vivé's wedding to Chris, whom you'll meet below in this week's featured
writing, Vivé's essay "To Make It Through," which was published in The Sun this past April.
Here's to making it through the toughest of times by coming to understand, to quote a line from Vivé's beautiful essay, "that we [can] take care of each other in the hardest of times."
Love and light,
Maureen
TAG, I'M IT! 65th Birthday Celebration Sale
(Because I'm celebrating all month long)
Both the year-long TAG, I'M IT! (on sale for $16.65) AND three-month TAG, I'M IT! (on sale for $6.50) offer—in no more than five to fifteen minutes—a simple way to recap and celebrate the very best of each day of your life. The practice of writing out your “T’s” (things you’re thankful for), “A’s” (actions you can acknowledge yourself for), and “G’s” (gifts you’re grateful for) is a transformative one, especially combined with the final step, I’M IT!, in which you intentionally choose three do-able,
most-important-to-you actions you’ll take the next day.
The TAG, I'M IT! journal grounds you in two important habits: keeping your focus on appreciating and celebrating the good in your life and intentionally accomplishing what matters most to you. You’ll also create a record of
your most meaningful, happiest events and experiences.
Start your journal—or restart, if needed—whenever you like. (Though a new year is a perfect time!)
An introduction with tips and ideas will help you make this practice your own. Soon, you’ll notice that you’re living your days with more joy, presence, purpose, and intention.
Vivé Griffith is a poet
and essayist, a teacher and educational leader, a builder of community. She believes in creating spaces for people to explore their intellectual and creative lives and to connect with others. She lives in Austin, Texas, where she teaches poetry in the community and works as "chief storyteller" for the Clemente Course in the Humanities, an organization offering free college humanities classes to those who have faced barriers to the classroom. Every Sunday she pops a new poem in her curbside poetry box. Her writing has appeared in the Washington Post, The Sun, and Oxford American.
Want to learn more about the Clemente Course in the Humanities? Check out the documentary A Reckoning in Boston, premiering on PBS on Martin
Luther King Day, 2022: https://www.pbs.org/independentlens/documentaries/a-reckoning-in-boston/
WordPlay Featured
Writing
To Make It Through
by
Vivé Griffith
When Chris found out he needed to have major heart surgery, he said, “You shouldn’t marry me.”
We had been together three years and had shared a home for two of them, cooking in tandem in the kitchen and eating dinners at the scuffed wooden table with his adolescent daughter. The summer before, he had proposed to me on a
bench on an Italian hillside so picturesque it might have been a film set.
“You should get out now,” he said.
I wasn’t going anywhere.
Except, it turned out, to appointments with specialists and to heart hospitals for tours and to discussions with people who had already had valve-repair surgery and offered to share their stories. On paper Chris and I laid out
timelines and arranged in columns the pros and cons of robotic procedures versus the kind where they saw open your sternum and sew it up.
On a mild October afternoon we exchanged vows under a post oak in our yard and danced to a Texas swing band on a parquet floor laid over the grass. The next summer we drove three hours north from Austin to Plano, Texas, to check
Chris into the Baylor Heart Hospital. This would be the moment when everything changed, I believed. There would be a before and an after. We were meant to learn something profound and life altering from this experience, and we would forever benefit from that wisdom.
I think about this now, a dozen years later, as Chris and I weather the global pandemic: the blitheness, the arrogance that I carried into that moment.
It’s a hubris I recognize in the articles that appeared almost immediately after the shelter-in-place orders were announced. There was a quick grab for toilet paper, and then on to bettering ourselves in the midst of tragedy:
“31 Important Things to Do to Make the Best Use of Your Time During Quarantine”; “15 Ways to Turn Self-Isolation into Self-Improvement.” (Create homemade gifts! Become craftier!) And I, too, imagined the great things I could do in this moment of uncertainty: Finish writing the book I’d been picking up and setting down for years. Take up the piano.
Instead, during those first weeks of quarantine, I found myself curled on our cat-shredded couch with an array of remotes by my hand, watching the cooking-competition show Chopped. (How could they give the win to the guy who overchurned the ice cream?) I counted packages of beans in our pantry and barked at Chris for using the last of the milk. On my desk sat a long list of tasks for my job, all left undone.
When Chris was released from the hospital, he was so weak that just stepping into the heat of a Texas summer made him dizzy. I drove us home to Austin, though I was too tired, really, to be behind the wheel, worn out from worry and shoulder rubbing, from the
halting walks around the unit floor, Chris pushing his IV stand ahead of him. . . .
Read the rest in The Sun here: To Make It Through
~ Vivé Griffith
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 "through."
PROMPT:
Write about "making it through" a difficult circumstance, in the genre of your choice, whether it's your own story or anyone else's, real or fictitious.
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 two collections of poetry, 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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