Category Archives: nwp

Image by Ioachim Marcu from Pixabay

Each year, my National Writing Project colleague, Deanna, creates an Advent Poetry calendar, with daily links to poems on a theme. This year, the theme is “love” and I am enjoying her curation of poems, as I take lines from the poems to inspire my own writing each morning.

See Deanna’s Advent Of Love Calendar and consider writing your own poems.

Peace (and Love),
Kevin

This summer, the National Writing Project hosted a series of virtual visits to Writing Project sites for writing events in its annual Write Across America project. I didn’t attend any of the virtual writing events, alas, but I did use the resources generated by each site to write and compose digital poems. I’ve shared them periodically, but I wanted to gather them in one post.

Nebraska

Georgia

Virginia

Connecticut

California

Arizona

I enjoyed the challenge of using places for inspiration, but I appreciated the resources gathered by NWP friends in each of those sites, as the breadth of images, stories, videos and other elements provided many inroads for writing.

Peace (Landscapes),
Kevin

 

I finally got to see the prompts from the last summer stop for the National Writing Project’s Write Across America, and the Central Arizona Writing Project focused on the Grand Canyon as its source for writing. Some other day, I am going to gather the digital poems I did this summer into one post.

Peace (and poems),
Kevin

This week’s stop for the National Writing Project’s Write Across America was at the South Coast Writing Project at UC Santa Barbara (California) and the theme was social justice.

I chose an image by photographer Mary Ellen Mark called The Damm Family In Their Car, which was a powerful visual of a family on the edge, and the description with the image mentioned the family’s dog, too, and that dog — Runtley –  became the focus of my poem.

(Note: Copyright protections means I could not use the actual image and the dog image here was generated by Adobe Firefly)

Peace (and Support),
Kevin

The latest stop for the National Writing Project’s Write Across America – where different Writing Project sites are hosting writing activities – was Connecticut and the focus was on state parks. Interestingly, I grew up in the town next to one of the parks — Sleeping Giant State Park – and spent a lot of time there.

But I didn’t know much of the myth of the Giant, so I enjoyed learning more of the Native American stories and then using some of that in the digital poem. The Sleeping Giant actually looks like a giant, on its back, napping.

Learn more about the Sleeping Giant.

Peace (and Poems),
Kevin

The latest stop on the virtual summer writing tour of various sites of the National Writing Project — known as Write Across America – was in Northern Virginia and the theme of exploration was ghost stories.

I missed the Zoom session but I used some of the resources to explore some interesting stories, including that of the “Female Stranger” of Alexandria, which features a headstone in a graveyard and only hints at her story. This one informed my poem.

Here some of my other poems from my other stops –

Nebraska

Georgia

Hawaii

Peace (In Explorations),
Kevin

 

This poem is part of the National Writing Project’s summer Write Across America project, which different NWP sites and affiliates across the country are hosting place-based writing sessions.

I guess I tend to not be part of the Zoom sessions (so far) but I do use the resources and prompts for my own writing, on my own time. The latest visit was to Georgia, and one of the resources was a page about the McIntosh County Shouters, and their use of song and dance to tell stories, and to remember. The video I watched was about Jubilee, and that inspired the poem.

Peace (and Dance),
Kevin

I’ve been circling around a few days late to the National Writing Project’s Write Across America visits, in which different sites host writing activities. The last virtual visit was to Nebraska, a state which I don’t know much about. Thus, the title of my poem, which I then made into a digital format. And I sure hope I got the basic facts right, too.

You can read the poem as text here.

Peace (Wandering The Terrain),
Kevin

The National Writing Project just kicked off its annual summer writing adventure called Write Across America, in which various NWP sites host online gatherings and share place-based prompts to spark writing. I missed the first session from the Hawai’i Writing Project, but the presentations are archived, so I went in to see what had been happening.

One of the prompts had to do with the native Hawaiian concept of Mo’olelo — a way to be spiritually connected to the native world — and it was described here. I liked this ending of that post: “Everything in the world was alive with a presence, vitality, and meaning that our worldview does not recognize.”

I am not suggesting that I completely understand the concept. I am not a native Hawaiian and my roots to my land seems less connected that I would like. But I used that idea of connection to the spirit of the land for a poem response.

Here’s what I wrote:

we
don’t listen
we
barely hear
we
forget noticing
we
lose ourselves

we
the stories
of the world
embedded in this place
remain undiscovered

we
wander this terrain
of rock and soil
and river

we
need to linger
longer in the quiet,
listening for

us

we
should listen
we
can hear
we
are noticing
we
find ourselves

here

Peace (and Roots),
Kevin