Firefly’s Fall Workshop Line-Up Just Launched!
A top-down photo of multi-coloured paint chips on an old wood backdrop.
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Our fall writing workshop line-up launches today, and I’m indulging myself in my favorite lines from fall poems.
It seems like there are so many of them.
There’s “Fall Song” by Joy Harjo, with the line — “I need a song that will keep sky open in my mind.”
There’s “Aubade in Autumn” by Peter Everwine — “Love is the ground note; we cannot do / without it or the sorrow of its changes.”
Ada Limón’s “It’s the Season I Often Mistake” — “What good / is accuracy amidst the perpetual / scattering that unspools the world.”
Lately, I’ve been especially fascinated by centos, which are poems made entirely of lines from other poems. This is in acute contradiction to the ideas so prevalent right now about ownership and copyright… Which of course do have their place. Poets need credit and celebration. But within that commitment, what else can be true?
Truth is, I think, writing is never a solo act.
Our voices are always partly a chorus. We are constantly building on each other, learning from each other, becoming wiser and braver together. None of this is solitary.
A couple weeks ago, a workshop participant said — I want to remember that my words don’t belong to me. They come through me, but they’re for the world.
How would writing change if we all believed that? If we saw it as our responsibility to keep offering our work to the world, so that the gift of words keeps moving?
Today, I’m sharing Cameron Awkward-Rich’s poem, “Cento Between the Ending and the End.” He went the extra mile and made a cento about friendship using lines from his friends’ poems… The gift of words, circular and nourishing.
I think this is what we do in workshops, whether we realize it or not.
We let our work move through us, into the group. We listen, listen, listen. We try not to grip — grip the idea that our work has to be exceptional, grip the idea that we know what we’re doing. We lower the bar, laugh hard, and write right to the cusp of what we know how to do, and then push that cusp back.
We inspire each other.
We expand together.
We refuse the old story that writing has to be a solitary slog, and we figure out, together, with what else is possible.
Wait, do you want to write a cento? Like right now?
I made up a resource for you with some of my favourite poetry lines to get started on your own cento. The sources are listed; if you use these, shout out who wrote them originally.
Mix in those fall poems at the top of this newsletter. Mix in lines from songs you love. Mix in that perfect sentence your friend said in your last phone call. It’s all for you. And you, in turn, are for it.
In it with you,
