Category: Uncategorized

A great piece by Dani Shapiro about critics, criticism and finding your balance when your words live out loud.

Here is a link to her blog.

Twenty years ago today I married this man. I love you, Terry Crowe. You are my rock.

dishes

orange green purple

italian country dishes

with roosters

and rabbits

and carrots and dots

cheerful

hand-painted

hard to break

seeing them i feel uplifted and

joyful and home

white porcelain with

royal blue and gold

rims

my grandmother’s

dishes

fragile like her

a woman i never met

she whom my mother mourned

for as long as i knew her

elegant and simple

like my grandmother

these heirloom dishes

will stay in my keeping

until i too die

like my grandmother

her life cut short

in auschwitz

concentration camp

concentration camp dishes

white blue gold

fragile but heavy

with memories and

guilt

my mother’s

guilt for leaving

her mother behind

at the train station in vienna

when she left

with my father

who saved her life

long ago

eighty years ago

and the dishes

always remind me

of what we

all lost

what i

lost

and find again when

i place the

white blue gold

dishes on my

table

used again

by living breathing

people

my grandmother

smiling gently sweetly

my mother grateful

i always grandmotherless

and now motherless

travel through time

and reclaim my legacy

I came across this magnificent post by writer/writing teacher Laura Davis. Feeling her approach to a writing retreat was not deep enough she asked herself and her students, what’s the story you haven’t been able to tell yet? What’s the story underneath the story you tell yourself and others? Those questions led her to post this fantastic article about the need to Get Grief Right. As a writing teacher, a griever and the co-author of a novel about a group of grievers I’m so very grateful to Laura Davis this morning. Here is the article, “