The morning after the 2016 election I picked up a friend to do errands. My friend, who is Black, took one look at me and said Alison, what happened? What’s the matter? I looked at his puzzlement and worry with disbelief: What do you mean, what’s the matter? After a minute his face cleared and … Continue reading Poem of the Week, by David Whyte
It is impossible to be a woman, it is impossible to be a woman: a mantra I chant to myself at some point almost every day. This mantra is usually comforting, in a weird way, because it reminds me I didn’t make this suffocating, cruel, abusive system we live in, nor am I alone in … Continue reading Poem of the Week, by Ginny Lowe Connors
The other day I recaulked my bathtub. Razored out the repulsive old caulk, chipped and dug, alcoholed and bleached. Cut the tip off the tube of new caulk but the caulk gun didn’t work and I couldn’t squeeze it out of the tube. So I razored open the tube, spooned the caulk into a little … Continue reading Poem of the Week, by Ada Limon
Most of the time you don’t know, in the moment itself, the moments that will return to you for the rest of your life. The look on your daughter’s face that day, the way his hand felt when he held yours on the train. You don’t know when a moment will be the last time … Continue reading Poem of the Week, by James Laughlin
This poem awes me every time I read it. It floats me up above the earth and outside of time and noise and sensation while thousands of years of humans and our endless struggles against ourselves and the planet play themselves out below. We cut down our forests to make ships on the seas, the … Continue reading Poem of the Week, by Joshua Poteat
It was surprisingly easy to get, someone who never should have been able to buy a gun once mused to me, a sentence that still turns my body to ice. Last week at a Moth live show I sat in the front row the way I always do and watched warily as one of the … Continue reading (early) Poem of the Week, by Grant Clauser
This quote is from my novel All Rivers Flow to the Sea. It pops up here and there around the world, on Instagram pages and Pinterest boards, translated into various languages. It’s taken on a life of its own, one I couldn’t have predicted. But I do remember writing these words, how the sentences spun … Continue reading Poem of the Week, by Eileen Sheehan
Yesterday I opened a can of tomatoes, squished them through my fingers to break them up, added them to the soup, and suddenly pictured the long line of people who made this possible. The invisible humans who planted the seeds, watched over the growing plants, harvested the tomatoes, hauled them to the processing plant, trucked … Continue reading Poem of the Week, by Muriel Rukeyser
The other night I dreamed I saw a girl in a treehouse, reading. A girl in a hay fort, reading. A girl in her room, reading about worlds she didn’t live in, worlds that weren’t hers but maybe someday could be. All the girls were me. All were alone, none were lonely. None needed someone … Continue reading Poem of the Week, by Sara Teasdale
When someone signs up for a workshop they often say something like Alison, I need you to be hard on me. Don’t sugarcoat anything. I just tilt my head and smile. When I was young I sat through lots of tense workshops in which a few lukewarm-nice things were said and then the “real” critique … Continue reading Poem of the Week, by Jim Moore
Goodies from my mailbox and camera
Telling all sides of the parenting story
Waking Up to Your Dreams
On James Baldwin and Diverse Literature
Putting those recalcitrant toddler cancer cells to bed...
your own PDK for writing
a collection of beautiful words.....
Objects, Memory and Meaning
If it can't be said in a hundred words, then it can't be said in a thousand.
sewing a handmade wardrobe
"drink from the well of your self and begin again" ~charles bukowski
Musings on poetry, language, perception, numbers, food, and anything else that slips through the cracks.
Thoughts on the world around me
Alison McGhee 