Guided Writing Session Directory
Below, you will find recordings for each Guided Writing Session dating back to August 2021 when the sessions began.
Take a moment to review the Usage and Guidelines Folder below for information on how to post work and use the directory.
Use the Independent Entries Folder for submissions not specific to a monthly program or Guided Writing Session.
More About Guided Writing Sessions
Meditation on Frost’s Poem
Meditation on Frost’s The Road Not Taken
Another crossroads.
Time to make another choice.
Does my selection make a difference
or do all roads lead to Rome?
The self-organizing property of mathematics
says the complex system regulates
its own becoming.
Things maximize their intricacy.
Does this imply I am a riddle
With my solution written into me?
A preordained addition that totals more
than my numbers would imply?
It’s not so much what happened
as the meaning I give it.
I can remember foster care as an ordeal
of separation from my mother.
I can focus on my fury when the fire
took everything away, and my fear
upon waking in a strange room.
My memories can be sad.
Or I can cry past my tears and see
the gifts of the experience.
Only four years old, and already
learning people can live in different ways.
My foster sister’s Girl Scout troop
gave me a party, with toys to make up
for the ones I’d lost. They made me smile.
The big girls paid attention to me!
I was used to being the big sister
to my little brother. I was supposed to
watch out for him. But I was four.
My stomach growled, hungry.
He wasn’t trying to go potty. I decided
I could leave him upstairs for awhile.
I thumped downstairs to let my anger
out of me, pounding it with my bare feet.
If I’d played good girl that day,
would he still be here? Did I kill my brother
by behaving as a selfish child?
My foster mom said no.
She said it calmly, her head nodding
with emphasis. She held me with
the constant order of our life.
Different bed, same bedtime.
Different food, but same order of meals.
Old friends absent, but there are new ones.
An expectation she’d be the mother
and I the child at play, no other job to do.
I thank her for soothing me
when my mother was too racked
by her own grief to tend to mine.
For alloparenting me.
What a wonder it is when a stranger
comes to catch you from your fall.
The world seems clearer, made of one cloth when we look out for each other.