Kiss the Ground: Wonderfully inspiring and empowering movie about climate change. Free to watch on Netflix
Geraniums
Now, years later,
it’s the small things
that devastate
defiant red
geranium petals shivering
frail and stubborn
in summer wind
that shakes their pithy stalks
others balance above,
already black or wilting pink
but holding on
the way my six-year-old niece
I haven’t seen since Christmas
hefts plastic bags sagging with weight
of milk and nectarines,
strips of handles biting into
her determined fingers
as she looks up at me
and says with utmost gravity
“I lost two teeth”
frowns down her lip to reveal
the gap between
where adult tooth’s jagged line
white enamel peaks
emerge from red ridge of
tissue-cushioned bone
the way today as I swam
in water that never refuses
my body with its heart’s pain
both niece and nephew crowded
toward me sputtering laughter
attacking with their water guns
so that
I remembered what a
good mother I once was
and how I loved it
then
when three sons
were all still mine.
So today sadness
swims inside me
so that I look on,
its depth
and weight still surprising.
But now I know there is nothing
to do
but let it
flood and swirl
unchecked
unstoppered
rising
until everything is saturated
and the levels
drop and
it drains away again.
— Catharine H. Murray, 2013
On Halloween, a time when creativity and self-expression are at play, consider joining the next round of LITTLE FRANKENSTEINS.
This time of year marks the beginning of turning toward the fertile ground of winter darkness to delve into the richness of our own creativity. Celebrate your own process by joining LITTLE FRANKENSTEINS , the prose and poetry online workshop Sarah Carson and I are teaching together Fridays from 1 – 3 PM EST. There are still a few spots left in this 5-week series beginning this week on November 3rd.
This small group workshop class focusses on the short form, with one form assigned each week to help you create a piece of prose or poetry to bring to class the following week for revision and improvement. During the first five weeks, I have been impressed by the way this format allows for surprisingly creative and compelling pieces of writing to come into the light.
I hope you will join this lovely group of writers. For more information and to register, click HERE.
Feel free to contact me with questions about the class.
AND HAPPY HALLOWEEN!
Featured Writer: Beth Ayotte
Beth writes:
My first experience with creative writing happened during my participation in the annual USM
Stonecoast Writers’ Conference in 2004. I submitted a journal entry at the time, not knowing
what literary genre my composition fell into. I knew it wasn’t fiction, a novel, or a play, so I
dubbed it creative nonfiction. Since then, my work has appeared in the LLI Review, a journal of
the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, and Down East Magazine. For the last three years, the
support and encouragement from Catharine and my colleagues in a Zoom memoir class has been
amazing. So much so that I’m currently writing a memoir about my late son Sam, an accomplished ski racer, who died in an accident during a Make A Wish fundraising competition at Wildcat Mountain..
Click the link below to read “A Whiff of You”, Beth’s essay about motherhood, memory and grief.
September Dawn
I could not sleep.
I lay still and wondered why
I ate too much last night. I read too much.
Tried to stop my mind
sink into sensation of heavy limbs and body’s warmth
no use against these currents sweeping me upstream
whirling pools of worry to devastate my rest.
Perhaps it is not too early to get up.
I shake off heavy blankets of late summer
stand up and walk to the door to push
to feel the familiar click that gives way to opening,
and step into September dawn.
Treasures of light spread wide
before me like sudden gifts
Rosy pinks fall into soothing blues as
the sun prepares to anoint me with her light.
Dark spines of needled pines pierce gauzy mist .
And I walk down to water’s edge to
receive
this sacrament of sunrise.
—Catharine H. Murray
Catharine H. Murray 