One of our Board Members had the brilliant idea to honor Pat by using her work as prompts in AWA workshops. We’re collecting these invitations here and also sharing them in our monthly emails to affiliates. We also hope this serves to produce a body of work that we could collect, at some point, for a celebration of Pat.
September 2020
For this month, we invite you to reflect on her poem, “Truth Enough.” You could invite writers to begin with her line, I tell you the truth, and see what comes. You could suggest that writers imagine the scene of a haircut at home. Or, you can simply read this excerpt aloud and see what inspiration comes.
October 2020
Annie Fahy inspired this month’s invitation with her tribute video to Pat. Sue Reynolds influenced it as well. She often uses as a prompt the suggestion to write about a spice used in a mother’s kitchen. This excerpt may inspire similar sensory detail and memory about food and home. Or it might cause a writer to explore the qualities of a list. Finally, the title of the poem is a rich prompt in and of itself.
November 2020
This recently republished essay from The Sun is our inspiration this month. Sue Reynolds used this piece to write with women in jail. Choose a sentence or a paragraph to prompt writing, or draw your writers’ attention to the central meditations on fairness and presence.
December 2020
AWA affiliate Julia Katz brought our attention to a beautiful video of Pat reading selections from her book, The Weight of Love. The excerpt below comes from one of those poems, published in an earlier version by The Sun magazine.
Our suggestion is to use the poem as a prompt to develop character. Read it and then ask your writers to make a list of five actions a character does with their hands, ideally tied to identity (like writing, plowing). Once they’ve made their lists, have them choose an action and start describing it. If they’re up for more structure, invite them to pick two and try writing from one action into anther. They may find a metaphor as they go, the way Pat finds the lines on a page of writing becoming the furrows of a field.
