For the next few weeks, we are sharing writing that happened during AWA’s yearly marathon fundraiser, Write Around the World.
We offer this in appreciation for the workshop leaders and writers who joined together to raise money for AWA. What a vibrant celebration of the community we make when we share our words with one another!
Thanks to you, we are able to launch a new initiative for veterans and their families and to, as always, offer scholarships to make our training and affiliate programs more accessible. We are grateful to all who shared their voices throughout the month of May and who gifted us their writing to be shared here.
If you’re inspired and would like to be part of the fundraiser, please donate!
From Laurie Larson-Doornbos’ Pocket Writes Write Around the World group in Grand Rapids, MI
A lemon hung in all her yellow gloss glory and hidden pulpiness from the bough of the tree, like a snowdrop, like a blossom, like a moonbeam. She hung and grew, expectantly, waiting and growing and waiting some more. She felt her bulginess, her ripeness, her becomingness, her tart puckering mouth-filled shout of joyfulness, and waited for that sound: a hum, a whisper from without: “There is a beauty!” came the words. She was plucked, something broken, and sprung from her dangling branch of primordial place called “home.” She found herself a new one – a warm hand, gnarled hand tender with age, experience, expectations and dreams released. Then broken into and squeezed, she became juicy.
—Beth Blackbird
Words That Gag You
Sometimes, after the fact, you realize there are words you wished you’d said. Maybe you had no words at the time. Things happen fast. Maybe you were at loss, just mad or whatever. Maybe you had words, plenty of them, but, they gagged you. Looking book you think of all the words you might have said. Words to explain and words that might gag you.
Too late for that now.
—Tom Mort
A Skeleton Key
This key doesn’t really open anything. Nothing physical anyway. It is to wind up a spring. Maybe the spring in a clock to measure out another day or week, maybe to wind up a toy with a spring powered motor to move about the room. Maybe in the form of an automobile or an elephant. Maybe it is a music box or something else entirely.
It doesn’t open any lock. It does open your mind and imagination to a bit of entertainment or engagement of some sort.
—Tom Mort
Things We Bury
Some things we bury: seeds, memories, the dead, waste, things to hide, foundations, secrets, gold, divinity, coffins, pain.
Empires rise and fall. They spring up like seeds that have been planted and have sprouted. But as everything put together falls apart, they eventually fall. New empires emerge from what is left behind. Their foundations are the waste, secrets, dead, gold, divine, coffins, pain and memories of the past.
The world spins around, the earth circles the sun, the cycle continues. Another empire falls and another is built upon the shards of its past.
—Tom Mort