We used to call them the funnies, and I have a memory of sitting on my dad’s big lap while he folded the newspaper in half, then quarters, so he could read them to me. This would have been on a Sunday, because I remember the strips as being full-color. I still read the daily comics, even though most of them are terrible – tired, unfunny, boring, and retreading the same exact ground for decades on end. Once in a while a strip comes along that’s electrifyingly good –Calvin & Hobbes, Boondocks, Cul de Sac–but they don’t last long, usually because their creators have the courage to cancel them when they’ve run out of steam. So I read out of habit, with no expectation of transcendence. But every once in a while one of them pierces my heart, like today’s Pearls Before Swine, by Stephan Pastis.
My friends, I’m offering a bunch of brand-new one- to three-day creative writing workshops in 2018. Topics include The Freedom of Form, Playing with Tense and Point of View, Writing through Pivotal Moments, and –for the first time ever– Creative Writing Boot Camp! Dates, descriptions and details can be found below. I’d love to see you in one of these workshops.
Poem of the Week, by Sinead Morrissey
The first time I read the poem below a scene from the past flashed up in my mind: a winter day which my then-preschool children spent playing Ewok, which translated into them marching around the house/forest with yardsticks as hiking sticks. My son was Master Logray and my daughter was Teebo, 
names and roles taken directly from a seriously cheesy VHS TV series called Ewoks (which I probably found for a quarter at a garage sale). What I remember most is my daughter’s bright eyes as she tromped around the house after her older brother, who was always kind to her.
My children rarely fought when they were little, but when they did, it always troubled me deeply. If the battle went on too long, I would tell them Listen to me. You have to be kind to each other, because someday I’ll be gone, and your dad will be gone, and it will be just the three of you to watch over each other. This is kind of a horrible thing to say, now that I look back on it, but it’s also kind of true. Which might be why reading this beautiful poem brought an instant lump to my throat.
The Rope
– Sinead Morrissey
I have paused in the door jamb’s shadow to watch you
playing Shop or Cliff! or Café or Under-the-sea
among the flotsam of props on our tarmacked driveway.
All courtship. All courtesy.
At eight and six, you have discovered yourselves friends,
at last, and this the surprise the summer
has gifted me, as if some
penny-cum-handkerchief conjuror
had let loose a kingfisher . . .
you whirl and pirouette, as if in a ballet
take decorous turns, and pay for whatever you need
with a witch’s currency:
grass cuttings, sea glass, coal, an archaeopteryx
of glued kindling from the fire basket.
You don two invisible outsize overcoats – for love?
For luck? And jump with your eyes shut.
And I can almost see it thicken between you –
your sibling-tetheredness, an umbilicus,
fattened on mornings like this as on a mother’s blood,
loose, translucent, not yet in focus
but incipient as yeast and already strong enough
to knock both of you off your balance
when you least expect it, some afternoon after work
decades hence,
one call from a far-flung city and, look,
all variegated possibles – lovers, kids, apartments –
whiten into mist; the rope is flexing,
tugging you close, and you come, obedient
children that you are, back to this moment,
staggering to a halt and then straightening,
grown little again inside your oversize coats and shoes
and with sea glass still to arrange,
but without me watching.
For more information on Sinead Morrissey, please click here.
Minnesotans! I’m offering three free workshops this spring on the transformation of trauma. 
I’m thinking of the man in the white shirt and the black pants, the one holding a briefcase, who stepped in front of the tanks in Tiananmen Square and stood there. I’m thinking of the girl in the long dress, the one who slid a flower into the barrel of the gun the officer had trained on her. I’m thinking of the woman who began a conversation with and ended up becoming a second mother to the boy who murdered her own son. I’m thinking of this tiny beautiful prayer by Danez Smith. A new year to all. May ruin end here.
“It was a time like this. . . when all things fall apart.”
Thirty years ago I stood in a kitchen reading through a letter of complaint sent to a business about one of their products. “Oh my God,” I remember saying. “Whoever wrote this letter is a horrible speller. And the grammar? Jeez!” Then I turned the page over and looked at the signature. And realized that the letter had been written by someone I loved, someone who had worked incredibly hard their whole life long, someone who could always be counted on to help, someone who was right there in the room. 
A house I used to live in was filled with a dark and ominous energy that I felt every time I approached the front door. When I dreamed, dark birds hovered silently in the air around me, landing on my shoulders and head. The dark birds wanted me — they wanted me dead. I lived in a state of permanent exhaustion, surrounded by the forces of darkness. 
Alison McGhee 