| Heya <<First Name>>,
Last week I got to talk to a wonderful group of 4th-graders about haiku. (Thank you, Ms. Mucha!)
Toward the end of our hour together, one of the students asked me where I got my inspiration for writing.
“From a few places,” I said. …
From asking “What if?”
What if souls got bored and liked to move around to different bodies every week*?
From looking at life from different perspectives.
Say I’m a zombie girl who’s just turned 13 and my parents still won’t treat me like a grownup. What do I do?
From asking what rules I can break.
Does a haiku have to be three lines and 17 syllables?
Speaking of breaking rules, one student asked if you could write a haiku in pictures.
What a wonderful idea! Sure!
What would it look like? I don’t know, but I hope they write it so I can find out.
From letting any old thing qualify as “inspiration.”
The poet William Stafford once said that when his writing wasn’t going well, he just lowered his standards.
Maybe that’s helpful if you, like me, have a particularly vocal inner critic.
From being vulnerable.
I told Ms. Mucha’s class that when my sister Tracie got sick last year, I’d send her haiku poems on postcards.
we’re merely space dust
drifting in the sea of time
but the coffee’s good
I took inspiration from any old thing. Childhood, coffee, the river that flows out back of the house where I live.
we carry the past
the way the river carries
yesterday’s big rain
What I liked was the way the poems helped me see the infinite in the ordinary.
even years later
your kindnesses nourish me
… what we do ripples
And the way they helped us deepen our relationship before she passed.
when I came unmoored
talking with you would calm me
every. single. time.
Attention is such a gift.
We’ll be starting a new story next week. Till then, happy reading.
Jeff, Bob, and Zoe …
… who believe that reading with kids can change the world for the better
Me and my sisters: Kelly, top, and Tracie, right. |
