There are many forms of death by Kevin Hershey, writer in Writing Circles for Healing workshop

There are many different forms of death

 

There’s the death of the bright yellow tulips

brought to my grandmother on Easter Sunday

already browning in their vase by Tuesday.

The death she awaits, as her green eyes grow foggier

each day staring toward the ceiling, looking for the place she knows she will go next.

This will be the death of the last immigrant

death when her green eyes close

and cease to reflect the green hills and gray seas of her home

and death of the stories she might never have told us.

 

There’s death in the piles of unread newspapers by her entry

faceless, nameless, technicolor death in oil-rich nations or marathon massacres.

Death was in the brown leaves that crumpled on the grass last fall

buried beneath a blanket of snow

only to resurface this spring, wet.

There was the death of that deer on Highway 61

who dashed out of the woods

and now she’s crawling with flies.

Hundreds of deaths all over the windshield

smudges obliterated by sprinkling skies

above the lakes next to the road.

Sometimes we call death

passing or crossing over or moving on

when it’s really just death

but sometimes it isn’t death at all

 

My hair was already dead

when it fell off my head

as chemotherapy caused the death of me from the inside out

a million little deaths in my cells that I could not even imagine

The backyard compost was full of death

when I scattered it with black shiny locks

greening orange peels,

the slimy pieces of onions we carelessly discarded,

old autumn leaves,

coffee grounds from many mornings ago.

My dead hair mixed with our dead waste.

It made a bed for next year’s tulips.        

Kevin Hershey returned to his hometown of St. Paul after completing college last year. Currently, his life is dedicated to full-time soul searching.

There's the Light (Writing Circles for Healing workshop participant)

                                        There's the Light from My Grandbaby

                  There's the light from her smile that greets me each time she enters the room.

                  The light of morning that moves on her face like invisible eyes blinking.

                  The light from her eyes as blue as the ribbon tied in a bow around her white face.

                  There's the light from her laugh that makes me a child after she wails and cries then

                  stops as if she was saying, I fooled you again.

                  There's the light from Van Gogh and Cezanne so perfectly arranged it moves my

                  blood to boil in my heart and sends little bubbles up my spine                                                                                                

                  and stimulates my mind for creations that I create.

                  The light from the moon that spreads in holy halos from its edge.

                  There's the light vanilla smell that emanates from her cheek against mine as we 

                  wrestle for the toys. 

                  There's the heat within the sun like the heat from her hands as she hugs my neck.

                  

                  There's the light through the shattered windshield after the wreck.

                  The light of winter’s skies, gray and still as the casket’s canopy.

                  There's the light reflections off my broom faced wrinkles as they gather as my mind

                  grows old and holes perforate my brain and block the memories of her.

                  There's the red light from a cat’s eye the in middle of the night Edgar Allen Poe.

                   There's the absence of light below the earth where the bugs and spiders clean the bones.

                   There's the empty light without her, without god, without soul, just an animal waiting for death.

                   There's the holy light of belief that relieves me as I lay down for my last sleep.

                Also, there's the light of god seen through the tunnel 
 that beckons me to her and to heaven 
 and to all my missing relatives and friends 

 that fly together on wings

 of wind to a better dimension of time and space.

Mark's statement: In '98 I contracted a serious case of colon cancer so I moved back here to be with my family.  After many months of treatment, the cancer went into remission; there has not been any since. In 2001 I was accidentally shot with a large caliber rifle and spent  months in the hospital near death many times. It has taken me 50 operations and 7 to 8 years pulling myself back together fighting chronic pain and infections. It is a story in itself of fighting through physical and mental trauma. I was always an artist ever since I was 5 or 6 when my brother and I started to draw to escape an alcoholic father and poverty.  I was always the best artist in the class and was chosen to do murals and art projects for the class. Through the years I've spent my time painting and writing poetry and short stories

 Mark East was a participant in Writing Circles for Healing presented by Wendy Brown-Baez and held at the Wellstone Center in St Paul. Wendy Brown-Báez is a fiscal year 2012 recipient of an Artist Initiative grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board. This activity is funded, in part, by the Minnesota State Legislature from the State’s art and cultural heritage fund with money from the vote of the  people of Minnesota on Nov, 4, 2008

  

Year End Review

The window for advance sales for transparencies of light is closing today. However, that doesn't mean you still can't order a copy; only that it doesn't count towards my print run. For those of you who have ordered it, bless you for supporting my endeavers to be a voice for women who are silenced by their cultures, their families or their own inhibitions.
http://www.finishinglinepress.com/ under new releases

Now with the intensive promoting behind me, I am preparing for spring readings.

Check my website. Each reading will feature different poets reading with me or musicians or dancers. This is still in process and not finalized. If you would like me to join your book club or writer's group to share my poems, my writing discipline and practice, my experience with publication and marketing, please contact me for setting something up after March 1st.
Of course, I am still reading selections from Ceremonies of the Spirit as well. What a joy that book has been for me!!!


I am also available for blog touring...if you have a blog and set up a date for me to be interviewed or post and be available for comments from your guests, that can also be arranged.

In the meanwhile, we are headed towards the cold, dark part of the year. Here in Minnesota we got over a foot of snow. The streets are silent and the only people who are out have to be. It is quiet in my home. I have lit a candle for La Virgin de Guadalupe, as it is Her Day, in honor of the Feminine Divine. I have been catching up with my blogs and my emails and next, maybe I will be couragous enough to tackle that box of notebooks full of scribbles from various writing sessions: the Mid-town Writers Group, the class at Face to Face, the women's retreats. And get back to scanning my memoirs, written on a word processor. (It seemed like the latest at the time, who knew that in a few years, those disks would be useless?) With the gift of a laptop from my good friend Chicago poet Ned Haggard, life is much easier and will be during recuperation from hip replacement this January.

I want to reflect back over my year, what I have accomplished and what has sustained me and urged me on. All writers know there are rejections and I am persistently rejected by some of my favorite publishers and literary journals, still I get off my knees, dust myself off, find another avenue. I want to acknowledge two amazing community efforts that did accept my work: Poets for Living Waters at http://www.poetsgulfcoast.wordpress.com/ and Saint Paul Almanac. Also Mississippi Crow, edited by my good friend Nadia Giordana who never stops coming up with new ways to promote not only her own work but others, especially women. Her blogtalkradio interview with me can be heard on my website: http://www.wendybrownbaez.com/ on the interviews page.
And Finishing Line Press accepted my manuscript for transparencies, for a spring birth.

I didn't do as many performances this year but Heal the Earth was my way of honoring and celebrating with a deep sense of gratitude our Mother Earth. It was amazing to work with 12 other women to make these events happen, to feel the energy shift as we created sacred space and shared our passion for the natural world.

The readings with Saint Paul Almanac were fun, I got to meet other writers and poets whom I had heard of and had never met. Especially Julia Klatt Singer, whom I knew from http://www.northography.com/. I have always admired her poetry and she will be part of my book launch in March, along with Joan Calof, story teller extraordinaire.

My biggest accomplishment was installing In the Shelter of Words, a multi-media art installation created by at risk youth from a writing workshop I taught. It showcased a CD of their words and was installed at Altered Esthetics Gallery, as part of Night On the Street and at Mid-town Global Market. Passers-by could catch a glimpse of what it means to be a teen who may not have a home, may be parenting and going to school, may be struggling to overcome choices made in the past. The sukkah is now in my garage, and someday it will be brought to another community venue with more poems added.

For the first time I read a poem while Sarah Arneson did an interpretive, intuitive dance. That was amazing, to see my words come to life and I want to do more.

This year has also had its troubles: my sister passed away form pancreatic cancer, my friend Wayne Crawford was also diagnosed with it, and the first anniversary of my husband Alejandro's death reminded me of how much I miss his vitality and being with him in Mexico. But I did take a Spanish class with the intention of interweaving more Spanish into my poems and gave a presentation at The Works: a Writer's Salon on Versos de Calaveras.

The poetry salon at All About the Journey http://www.allowharmony.com/ was a great opportunity to speak with writers and share my insights. Guess what I told them? Discipline! If you want to break out from writing to publishing, you have to be disciplined about submitting, editing, being critiqued, and blogging or keeping up your social networks. We are all in this together, my friends! Writing is a way to connect, to build bridges between us, to create understanding and awareness where there was once judgement or distance. We all have a story---but the stories are sort of the same story--overcoming adversity, appreciating how precious beauty is, wanting love and validation, wanting to give of ourselves deeply and with honor, peace and justice, truth and magic.
Don't you?

The year 2011 is approaching fast and I want to fling confetti this new year's eve. I have lived through my own story of deaths and loss and rejections and yes, self-doubt. But I am here, and I have a story to tell. Listen.

writing in a group

A few week-ends ago I led a writing workshop as part of Celebrate Yourself week-end women's retreat. The Saturday workshop was a writing circle for healing and Sunday's I call Spiritual Tune Up. The process of writing circles is simple: we read a poem, write spontaneously, then read what we have written without critiquing. All comments must consist of positive feed-back. The purpose of this is to quiet the left brain critic who tells us we can't write or that we're not good enough or what will the others think? The Judge, the Critic, or the child who was criticized for her creativity, this part of ourselves that watches us without tolerance or amusement at our efforts, not to mention never praises us for taking a risk, is calmed. Reading what we have written aloud is a risk; we feel vulnerable and sensitive and courageous. I acknowledge that.

Sunday's workshop starts with a meditation and uses poems with a spiritual slant to inspire us.

I have learned through the years of leading workshops to trust the process. Natalie Goldberg says go for what is rich with emotion, go for what you feel reluctant to say, go for the material that is hardest to write. Sometimes what we begin with: an image, a memory, a feeling, is not at all where we end up.

This week-end, someone thoughtfully brought along a box of kleenex, because as we opened our hearts, we needed it. There were losses and griefs that were heart-wrenching, there were stories of self-denial and fears of not being enough, not being held as precious and beloved. And as well, as I used prompts that focused on our blessings and our passions, there was laughter and remembrance of our innate worthiness. We honored our wholeness within our pain and brokenness.

Remembering is important for me, too. One line came into my head as I wrote: What would it be like to look up to myself?

I know the stories we are compelled to share are sometimes the ones we don't feel safe enough to share. How many of us have taken a writing workshop only to feel ripped to shreds by a critique that ignores the hard work we did to capture our deepest longings, our deepest despair, our deepest truth, the rent in the fabric of our daily lives that can lead to transformation and transcendence if we follow the frayed thread and not give up too soon?

It was a blessing for me to be in the circle, a circle that becomes sacred time and space as we articulate in our fumbling words, in our genius words, who we are and what has happened to us. The shortest bridge between two people is a story and I listen to yours and hold it close to me.