Angela Kelsey

Tell the Story

Freedom To Wear the Hat

Filed in Domestic Violence :: July 20, 2012

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 […]

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I’m back.

Filed in Writing :: June 3, 2012

I 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!).

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On Fire

Filed in Dating Violence, Domestic Violence, Stories :: April 11, 2012

April: 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 […]

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What have you survived?

Filed in Dating Violence, Domestic Violence, Stories, voices :: April 5, 2012

    In 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   […]

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What we see

Filed in Writing :: April 4, 2012

Tonight 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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