28 March 2020
“Try to praise the mutilated world.
Remember June’s long days,
and wild strawberries, drops of wine, the dew….”
From “Try to Praise the Mutilated World” by Adam Zagajewski
(Translation by Clare Cavanagh)
Make art today in praise, praising something, praising whatever is lifting your heart.
17 June 2017
Received several thank you emails from my online students today when our class finished. They never understand, I don’t think, how much I have to thank them for ❤
Create a thank you note (written, visual, musical, etc.) to someone else, someone who doesn’t realize how much gratitude your feel for them.
18 June 2017
My son came home this weekend, to celebrate Father’s Day with me 🙂 He says since I’ve been both mother and father, I get to celebrate both days. My mama always joked, If you can stand them til they’re twenty-two, you’ll get them back as friends. 🙂 I am so grateful for those kids, my three closest friends ❤
Make art about children as friends.
19 June 2017
Make art about peacemakers, about working to heal division.
17 May 2017
I hate grocery shopping. But today while grudging my way through it, I ran into a retired colleague whom I adore and haven’t seen in a while. He made me laugh, like always. And I laughed through the rest of the shopping.
Make art about something good arising from something you usually dread.
18 May 2017
Dreamt I was lighting candles, thousands and thousands of candles, as far as I could see.
Make art about the power small lights.
Thrilled and honored to start 2017 with my work being featured in MockingHeart Review, and to be in such good company there 
Thanks and Love to the fabulous Clare L. Martin for her beautiful spirit and hard work and for including me in her great journal
Check out MockingHeart Review, Volume 1 Issue 2 here!
Better Than Black Friday Writing Marathon!
Good Morning, Bargain Shoppers! No Lines! No Waiting!
24 New Prompts for our Third Better Than Black Friday Writing Marathon! Now posted!
Join us in the Facebook group, and git that write on, y’all!
https://www.facebook.com/groups/1512919158978356/
Something a little different this week: recommending a documentary, Poetry of Witness. Poetry of Witness is a 2015 documentary film directed by Billy Tooma and Anthony Cirilo about the lives of six contemporary poets who have lived through, and survived, extremities such as war, torture, exile, and repression, using poetry to preserve their memories.It debuted October 16, 2015 at the Buffalo International Film Festival.
The film documents the struggle of six contemporary poets who have faced the duress of war, exile, and human rights violations to give voice to their experiences while wrestling with the complex moral quandaries of artistic production, memory, and trauma. The poets: Carolyn Forché (Salvadoran Civil War), Saghi Ghahraman (Iranian Revolution), Fady Joudah (Doctors Without Borders), Claudia Serea (Socialist Republic of Romania), Mario Susko (Bosnian War), and Bruce Weigl (Vietnam War) offer first-person accounts of how their experiences as soldier, activist, doctor, and survivor imprint their poetry as evidence of those conflicts, rather than as representations of them.
Buy Poetry of Witness: The Documentary
A Couple of Suggested Anthologies (there are so many more…)
Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness
Award winning poet Carolyn Forché spent 13 years compiling Against Forgetting: 20th Century Poetry of Witness. It is an exhaustive and illuminating work of breadth, beauty, wisdom and tragedy.
More about the Poetry of Witness
Carolyn Forché talks about the poetry of witness
Poet Carolyn Forché gathers 500 years of suffering in new anthology
More About Against Forgetting at3Generations
Love y’all.
Mary
The moon does not fight. It attacks no one. It does not worry. It does not try to crush others. It keeps to its course, but by its very nature, it gently influences. What other body could pull an entire ocean from shore to shore? The moon is faithful to its nature and its power is never diminished. -Ming-Dao Deng
Mary Carroll-Hackett: Poetry and Prose 
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