Guided Writing Sessions

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.

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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.