"We'll Always Have Canton: New Work"

 

Prompts for the Lit Cleveland Fall Festival Audience:

1.      A sense of your childhood

Draw a picture of a place from your childhood. (If you have crayons around, use those, and use periwinkle and sea green liberally, along with any other favorite crayon colors, unless you are younger than I, and then use markers in pathetically fewer colors.)

Draft a poem about a regular event that took place there. In revision, focus on at least one of your five senses in the moment.

At the end of your poem, quote something an adult said or did OR say something you as a child didn’t say at the time and are saying now.

 

See Diane Kendig, “Reedurban, Ohio”

https://aboutplacejournal.org/issues/rust-belt-tales/growth-and-some-death/diane-kendig/

 

See also Elizabeth Biller Chapman, “On the Screened Porch”

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?volume=178&issue=4&page=24

 

 

2.      Mashup

Write about a sacrament in the religious sense (baptism, marriage, anointing the sick, confirmation, communion) or the personal sense (marriage, divorce) as an episode of a reality show you have seen. Use the format of the show as the format of your poem

OR
Draft a poem that combines lines from a famous classical poet with contemporary slang. (My favorite these days is from a black out poem from Shakespeare:

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day/Thou art…/hot.”

Based on Diane Kendig, “Epithalamion.” and “Next on Dateline: At the Swan and Hoop”(p10):
https://www.thebrokencitymag.com/archive.htm

(Click on “The Silver Screen” for pdf)

 

3.      Call and Response, Listing

Choose a color and research it, listing its features, pronunciation, literary associations, any associations, personal associations. Try a color weirder than Lynn’s and mine. Try mauve, for example. Then, try organizing your lists somehow, anyhow: by stanzas or as a shaped poem. Find a title. Find an end line.

 

See Lynn Powell, “Kinda Blue”
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/42180/kind-of-blue

And Diane Kendig’s rip-off, “Green, I Want You Green”
https://redwolfjournal.wordpress.com/2025/07/29/green-i-want-you-green-by-diane-kendig/

OR

Choose a poem by a contemporary poet and respond to the poet with a list, a poetic list. It may be why you agree with the poet. Or why you disagree. Or what you are adding to what they have to say.

Diane Kendig, “Des” in Comstock Review

ALSO, CHECK OUT “Read + Write: 30 Days of POETRY”
https://cuyahogalibrary.org/blog/poetry

INWARD Outside : all-day women's retreat

Retreat info here 

This October 3rd retreat was a wholesome, restful, inspiring day in the pavilion and grounds of the Tam O'Shanter Stark County Park for a bevy of terrific women from around the state.

After a terrific breakfast, we moved outside for some movement and then rested in a sound bath (omg, those chimes). We had a session on Intention setting and then a very gentle 3 mile walk, followed by my reading poems by Laura Grace Weldon, Ann Fisher Wirth, Mary Oliver, Maggie Smith, Wendell Berry, and me. After another healthy tasty lunch, I led a writing workshop with three prompts based on the poems I had read earlier. Two participants shared their response, which you will find at the end of this post. Then we had free time to read, write, veg, whatever. And all along, all day, there were optional full-body massages, head massages, a bath-salt building station. Finally, there was a movement hour with a yoga instructor and a last meal.

The brain child and host for the day is MALLORY MCCREA, whom you can find here, along with info on all the practitioners for the day. 

When this retreat is offered again, snap up a place for yourself. It really is a gift to your SELF.

Meanwhile, here are my three writing prompts and some responses:

 A tree- Write about one tree you saw today, or one where you live now, or one from your childhood (Based on Laura Weldon’s “Redwood Dharma” and Ann Fisher-Wirth’s “Catalpa")

Answer Mary Oliver’s question: what do you plan to do with your one wild & precious life, i.e., what is your longstanding plan, or what do you plan as of today? (Oliver’s “The Summer Day”)

  Write about someone who is no longer in your life, either because of death or a breakup or a misunderstanding.  “I keep wanting to phone you, ask something you would know” (Ann Fisher-Wirth )

The Winds Wings

by Sue B. Gahn

Connection to the winds wings

Breathing its calm

Its restlessness to always stay presently aware 

Of its messages of perseverance and release 

For the roots they do become uprooted

And we have choices 

As to how we perceive these changing winds

Challenging us to always look up

About My Brother
by Emily Orsich

Bury me beside the bones
of my mother’s first-born son.
Fold me into silence,
like the blanket you once wove—
threads now heavy with dust,
whispering stories of hands that shaped us.
His laughter still crawls
along the chambers of my skull
a swarm of bees humming through
the hive of my mind,
circling the hollows,
seeking a place to rest
that time has long abandoned.
Scatter the marbles.
Let them shatter the silence,
glass moons breaking loose
from forgotten constellations.
Beneath their rolling weight
you will find me,
pressed into the floorboards,
a splinter caught in the grain,
patiently waiting for your footsteps
to echo through the corridors.

Birth

by Kara Pellegrene 

Birthing my words my story. Oh what am I doing? 

Will they accept it will they reject it?

Do you really care? 

Yes! Yes! The inside me screams. 

They will see me, right through me.

Like I'm naked on a stage. With no more shield held up in front of my heart, that was always trapped in a cage. 

But here I am, I worked too hard. I cried and I pleaded to be set free. I let my heart bleed. Then I stitched her up. Through the seems my colors leaked, through my sorrows my dreams revealed - that I had to do this. I must reveal - if I want to heal, if I want to be of service. If I want to truly be free. 

I birth my story.

I set my pages free. Out into the world for those who need to hear, for those who suffered like me. 

It's not all about pain. But through those brakes I transpired - so you can too 

So birthing my story from me to you is what I must do.