At some point we just admitted we didn’t know how to mourn. We, the de-ethnicized Americans. Jewish people know how to mourn. Mexican people know how to mourn. Indigenous people know how to mourn, within their individual tribal customs. But some of us have been here so long we forgot where we were from. A cultural framework shows you what to do, makes some decisions for you so you’re less at sea to process this thing that is impossible to process. They are gone. So. Wear black. Wear white. Sit shiva for seven days, forget about comfort, cover the mirrors, forget about appearance, that doesn’t matter now. Then stand up and go back to your life. Walk in jazz funeral processions, and the music will move from dirges to dance tunes. Chop up the body and feed it to the vultures. Bury the dead in a coffin shaped like something they loved in life, a rose or racecar or guitar. A year after their death, disinter the body and dance with it, dress it in new clothes, throw a parade, tell them all the news. Dismember, roast, and eat the dead. Kill a member of another tribe to satisfy your rage. Throw a shovelful of dirt on the coffin, each mourner. Take pictures of the embalmed body. Keep locks of hair. Leave the body with useful tools, your best jewelry, flowers, prepare them for the other side. Some communities still know what to do. But some of us lost loss, forgot.
The Irish Americans started inviting us to their merry wakes, their funerals. It helped. To celebrate their life joyfully, be intimate with the body, it worked for us to collectively remember why it was worth it to love them. Don’t cry, it will keep the soul here. Then to watch a public performance of mourning—that helped, too. We could watch a woman keen, and it made us feel more pity and sorrow than if we were to cry, and it purged us.
Maeve MacNamara—the most famous keener in the world—knew, though we didn’t, that the term catharsis was originally a medical term for the expelling of menstrual and reproductive fluids. What the body doesn’t need anymore, to restore balance. We all knew the term as the reason we turn to art, the reason seeing someone else play out a tragedy helps us with our own. When the keener straightens her shoulders, lets us see her tears, then walks away, we follow her out of that space.
So, we agreed upon consensual reverse colonization—Ireland didn’t impose their cultural customs on us, but they let us adopt them.
https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2021-02-15 18:01:002022-02-25 17:18:19“For Antoine de Saint-Exupéry,” by Leigh Lucas (Poetry ’17)
Brother
Because he can’t tell his own story—
may he never sleep another night in jail.
May he never shiver heroin sweat, flea-bitten, rib-broken.
Because he forgot that we’d walked with our dog—
may he never forget the blue-spotted salamanders
we found in muddy banks,
or how we swung by the rope into those rough waves.
May he sing all night, dream of a sunflower woman.
And let me forgive him, brother and consolation—
though he dealt me a bad hand,
and the price rose.
Let me not forget him, brother and sorrow—
returned from prison, those five years
engulfing him like a rubber suit,
his cheerless eyes pondering me—
my every fortune.
https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2021-02-12 14:52:002022-02-25 17:18:17“Brother,” a Poem from the New Collection RELIQUARY by Abby Wender (poetry ’08)
https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2021-02-12 00:53:002022-02-25 17:18:16“Gravitationally Completely Collapsed Objects, as Observed from A Circumstellar Accretion Disk,” by Kevin McIlvoy
https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2021-02-11 00:47:002022-02-25 17:18:16“My Battery is Low and It’s Getting Dark,” by Dane Slutzky (Poetry ’21)
All morning my throat catches, the wind gray and wandering along the spine of grief hot from the bellies of howling dogs. The windchimes stir, agate clinking like a thousand well-learned prayers.
2. While hearing my children shriek in Spanish and English–playtime, two swings rising higher— a squirrel rests like a stone atop the fence.
https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2021-02-10 00:39:002022-02-25 17:18:15“Harbingers,” by Eric Cruz (Poetry ’20)
Let the inhabitants of the rock sing… Isaiah, 42:1
(Current)
In this river’s perpetual haste I am already always arrived, always already departed, the constant wanderer among the hosts of different worlds,
arrow and mark, the course through which I make things to make themselves, everything irreversible, the syntax in the enzyme’s shape, the atom’s charges
composing from within into a grammar of things— autocatalysis of particle into molecule into cell until the eyes form the way swirls form in water,
patterns risen out of patterns, until the patterns desire to know. This sweeping out of savannahs, over continents, across steppes—their driven waves—
attests the spur: my own long indigent venture on. Take this one with his kit-box, his tools, the pressed moons of bread he keeps to offer Mass, he’s shuttled
from Auvergne to Egypt, Sussex to Belgacoum, has barged the Huang-ho, mule-trained the Gobi, yet he knows all of space “is a veil without a seam.”
https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2021-02-06 00:26:002022-02-25 17:18:14“At the Grave of Teilhard de Chardin,” by Daniel Tobin
The 2021 Wally/Goddardite Alumni Conference will be held from Wednesday, July 14th to Sunday, July 18th.
Information regarding registration will be released AFTER the March Conference. There is still time to attend that spring fling and you can do so by filling out this form. Which you, like, totally should.
Now, you are undoubtedly wondering, is the summer conference in July going to be one of those beloved and much missed events in which we all gather at an agreed upon lovely locale and spend a few glorious days smiling at one another across the quad and sharing anecdotes of supervisors past whilst brushing our teeth in communal bathrooms?
Alas, dear ones, it will not.
We cannot go back, but the path to the place where we can be with one another and do so freely and without reservation, it seems reasonable to assume, stretches out beyond this summer.
But we are learning to make do, to flourish, even, in one another’s company in this digital era and so we will again. It’s not enough, but it’s enough. We are scheming, too, of ways we can get creative about region-based, supplemental in-person activities.
Stay tuned. More to come.
Dearly,
Ashley & Jen
https://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Post-Fallback-Small.jpg500500friendsofwritersbloghttps://friendsofwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/FOW_logo.jpgfriendsofwritersblog2021-02-03 17:52:042022-02-25 17:18:13Save the Date for the Summer Alumni Conference
