For about three years, I took spiritual refuge in an unprogrammed Friends (Quaker) meeting in West Texas. The meeting didn’t own their own facilities, so we either met for worship in the children’s education rooms of a local community church or had brunch and bible study at the clerk’s home. Each time, we all settled […]
Unwelcome by design
Sometimes it’s easy to know when you aren’t wanted. What gives that away might not be specific words said. The giveaway might instead be the arrangement of words, the justification of exclusive policies, or the perpetuation of vague criteria like “company fit” that keep the same old kinds of people in and the same old […]
Who tells your story?
Early on in high school, my English teacher introduced our class to U.A. Fanthorpe’s poem, “Not My Best Side.” It’s a snarky modern piece inspired by Paolo Uccello’s painting of St. George and the Dragon, and it features the perspectives of St. George, the damsel he aims to rescue, and the dragon who brings them together. Why, I […]
Imprinted with fear
Fear learned early can affect us life-long. In a working paper on the topic, Harvard child psychologists explain that intense, chronic fear and anxiety hampers children’s ability to learn, and undermines their ability to correctly perceive threats. Without intervention, children raised in chronically fearful environments learn to interpret ambiguous situations in a negative way, build stress as they […]
Get Lit: Pro-Literacy Poetry
“The greatest lessons you will ever teach us will not come from your syllabus. The greatest lessons you will ever teach us, you will not even remember… “There are things missing from our history books. But we were taught that it was better to be silent than to make Them uncomfortable.” —The Get Lit Players, […]
Verses from Sam Walter Foss
Off the clock this month I’ve been reading poems, and, for the first time in four years, writing some of my own. July will include an annual conference in Georgia and free time revising the poems I wrote this month. Among the art I rediscovered during June was the verse of Sam Walter Foss, an […]