Would you like to start the new year with an hour each morning of quiet writing in the company of others, without the pressure of sharing or feedback? Please join us January 6-11 for Write Together. 10-11 am Central Time, $100. I’d love to see you in the zoom room. Click here for all the details.
Sometimes I feel bowed down by the shame I witness around me. Heavy friends ashamed of their weight. Writers apologizing in advance for their words. Older friends ashamed of their aging looks. People ashamed of their jobs, incomes, homes, education or lack of it. The thing is that shame is a growth industry and it makes a lot of people a lot of money. All you profiteers out there feeling better from making others feel lesser: shame on you.
Injustice, by Piyassili, Assyria, 1218 BC
The people who are made to feel ashamed every day
are not the people who should feel ashamed.
The people who should feel ashamed
are the people unable to feel ashamed
yet heap shame by the bundle every day
on the troubled, the poor and despised.
Click here for more information about Piyassili of Assyria. I’m unable to find out more information about this poem.
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My podcast: Words by Winter
Alison McGhee 
This is GREAT!
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Isn’t it?? Written more than 3000 years ago.
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This has the writing style and paradox of the Dao De Jing. The Dao’s origins are in nomadic peoples and their oral traditions. I will ask a researcher in Ancient Chinese who I have come across if he knows of Piyassili. This is fascinating. We have clearly been shaming one another for millenia. It does’t mean we can’t reel it in and deal with it though! Thinking about your January morning writing but here I am shaming myself about having written something horrific. You can’t imagine the names I have been calling myself since then. My question then is how to be present in a course like that if things find themselves to the page which I did not know I was thinking
Would I be welcome?
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You would be SO welcome! I’ve written many horrific things, btw. And things finding themselves on the page which you didn’t know you were thinking is pretty much a description of the creative process. In this session there’s no sharing or feedback –we all just write together from a reading and a prompt (which you’re free to ignore)–so it’s really a freeing experience.
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