Tell the Story
I’ve been writing a series of freedom-centered writing prompts, and I want to share some of them here. Here’s the first one: In ancient Rome, slaves who were to be freed were given a hat called a pileus during a ceremony of emancipation. Reading that, I thought, “why would they want to wear a special […]
read moreI didn’t plan a “digital sabbatical,” but a blog break evolved. I want to tell you about the Peaces of Prosperity series on Bridget Pilloud’s site. My piece will be up later in the month, but here’s today’s Peaces of Prosperity post–including a prompt for your own writing (you know I love a good prompt!).
read moreApril: Month of rebirth, month of two anniversaries. Good Friday, 2002: a beating, an interim separation. April 11, 2007: another assault, an arrest, the first night of a final separation. Easter weekend 2012: time for a fire. Tonight two Adrienne Rich poems: “Burning Oneself Out,” its last lines: “or, as tonight, the mirror of the […]
read moreIn From a Survivor, Adrienne Rich writes, Next year it would have been 20 years and you are wastefully dead who might have made the leap we talked, too late, of making which I live now not as a leap but a succession of brief, amazing movements each one making possible the next […]
read moreTonight in my workshop we described the scene outside our window: a policeman supervised the removal by tow truck of a tar kettle that had, apparently, somehow collided with a streetlight before we arrived. Each of us wrote the scene quite differently. In The Art of Description, Mark Doty writes, “It’s incomplete to say that […]
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For years I kept secrets in silence. Then, once upon a time, I spoke and wrote them to a handful of people and began to blog anonymously. Today I tell my stories face-to-face, online, and in a memoir coming soon. Telling our stories leads to freedom, empowerment, and growth, for both the teller and the told. Is today your once upon a time, your time to tell your story?
