Blessed by Students

arrowhead retreat 2014

Okay, I’m a broken record on this subject but I’m blessed by having some of the most interesting people in L.A. as students. I conducted a workshop in Lake Arrowhead earlier this month and these terrific people above showed up. Literally we laughed and cried for three days. Frankly I think that people who have a deep desire to write are just more open, observant, emotional and braver than other people. It takes courage to come to a class or a workshop and bare your soul on paper with a bunch of strangers.

And now my UCLA Writers’ Program class is in its last week. The course is Advanced Non-fiction, four hours every Tuesday, and it’s mostly workshop, with discussions of what everyone is reading, (I believe you should read what you love and not what your teacher loves), writing exercises, and a poem read (because poetry cuts to the chase and teaches us how to write better prose.)  Here’s the beautiful poem by Peter Everwine that we’ll read tomorrow:   (Again, the spacing got flukey when I copied it. In the original it’s single spaced.)

 

After the Funeral

 

We opened closets and bureau drawers

and packed away, in boxes, dresses and shoes,

the silk underthings still wrapped in tissue.

We sorted through cedar chests. We gathered

and set aside the keepsakes and the good silver

and brought up from the coal cellar

jars of tomato sauce, peppers, jellied fruit.

We dismantled, we took down from the walls,

we bundled and carted off and swept clean.

Goodbye, goodbye, we said, closing

the door behind us, going our separate ways

from the house we had emptied,

and which, in the coming days, we would fill

again and empty and try to fill again.

– Peter Everwine

(It was published on Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry: Column 478.)

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