Writing with Rox WEEKLY—Numeral Poetry

One is the loneliest number you'll ever do.
Two: dosie dough your own.
Three: The little yellow giraffes on your third birthday cake at Uncle Irv and Aunt Teresa's endlessly, fenceless, plush green backyard in St Louis Park in June.
Four: My favorite number. Redish orange. My soccer uniform when I was on Alan's Angels.
Five: Jude and I share synesthesia, a sixth sense, which means we mix up and blend up our senses. We argue about what color five is: Mint green, I say.  No, muddy brown, he says.
Six  bears in a dish with bubblegum
VII  Emerald green, translucent. Best year of my life.
8 everyone's favorite number; why is that? Is it the resemblance to infinity? Because it is bluish purple?
nine   red, deep red.
Ten: On my tenth birthday, Ma post it noted a huge note on the closed kitchen door that said "You are now in the double digits. Congratulations!" I wondered about that as I rushed open the door and walked into the light, louvered kitchen nook and took my seat at the retro table in my yellow spinny chair across from Ben who wasn't there because everyone had already left for the day and it wasn't even ten yet.


Sometimes the craziest writes we have here together at the Beach are the ones when we have 4-5 minutes max until everyone has to be out the door and we pick a response write beginning with any chosen word or topic somehow related to what has just been workshopped or shared and I say, Go! DON'T THINK! GO! I'm not sure how we got on numbers the other day, but what a write it was. You oughta try it! You simply cannot do it wrong.

WRITE WITH ME? Pick any random number and start there, numbering as high as you wish. Or... number backwards for a twist (5-4-3-2-1). Or: Try your phone number, or the one you had as a kid (2-1-3-4-7-4-2-7-0-1) and see what instant thoughts/memories/nonsense/ appears. As always, follow your energy, see where it wants to go. For starters, limit yourself to 1-3 minutes, building up to 5-10, eventually taking as much time as you wish. You never know what's hidden beneath the numbers!


And speaking of things hidden beneath things, I am overjoyed to offer a couple new 4-week workshops this fall:

Don't Go Back to Sleep: The Words Beneath the Words: Introduction to Poetry Therapy 
Thursday Mornings 10am-noon, September 4, 11, 18, & 25  2014         $150

Awakening. Love. Kindness. The present moment. Mindfulness. These are a few of the themes we'll explore as we launch into the words beneath the words of beloved poets  Rumi and Naomi Shihab Nye. Open to all writers, healers, and anyone and all beings curious about how poetry can free the unfelt, the unspoken, while creating spaciousness in the body, mind, and of course, on the page.  We'll read and write together, discuss, arrive at our own insights and inspirations, create essays, poems, etc, and see what happens when we enter into the endlessly flowing stream beneath the words. 


WRITING VULNERABLY

4-class series meets monthly Wednesdays 9:30-noon  

Sept 24, Oct 22, Nov 19, Dec 17  2014      $150

Lately we've been hearing a lot about the health and quality of life benefits of becoming more aware of our own vulnerability and the importance of opening ourselves to this powerful human feeling,  yet what and how does that look like in a fear based world that increasingly emphasizes all the reasons we ought be scared, shut down, and hide? This workshop explores  how we can begin to hold both truths, what it looks like, and the importance to write (and live) our truth in the face of our own lives, no matter how scary. Write vulnerably, live deeply. Cultivate vulnerability on and off the page for a whole life story. 

Writing with Rox WEEKLY—Because Camping

Because it's already been a year
Because it's happy memory making for Jude
Because the stars
And the S'mores, even though I never eat them anymore because they don't taste the same
Because I loved them as a kid
Because I never went as a kid accept that time at Open School on the field trip to San Francisco and I wrote a short story about jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge and my teacher Sally let me and by boyfriend Lucas share his little baby blue pop tent
Because campfires
Because singing around the campfire
Because Two Cute Face brings his guitar and is too cute when he plays and I remember us like that, like that photo from the first year
Because my friends are really good at camping, even though they're Jews
Because it's nice to be taken care of as an adult in the littlest of ways like when your friend brings you a spare bungee chord that saves the day or shows you all the features on your tent you had no idea about
Because you're not as old as you think you are
Because it's romantic
Because the mosquito bites eventually go away
Because biking
Because that one time in Yosemite
Because fresh cool water
Because it's the quiet you've been looking for
Because your comfy bed at home is always here waiting


Write with me? BECAUSE POEMS are a great way to warm up to memories, thoughts, feelings, etc, and then to drop in and linger in anything that shows up. What do you love or not love about camping? What is your camping story?

WRITING WITH ROX Weekly—Amusement

Greetings from the Dells! It occurs to me that I probably like it here at kiddy Vegas more than my son. After all, this is our third year here and he, at seven, still refuses to go on the big slides, no matter how much I beg. I also have to talk him into going into the candy shoppes (don’t you love how they spell stuff in touristy places?) as well as the arcade. What is happening to youth of today? Who’s the child here?

As a kid, I begged my dad (no sense in begging Ma on this one: “do you think I’m driving to the fucking valley?”) year after year to take us to the big 3 in SOCAL: Disneyland, Magic Mountain, and Knott’s Berry Farm. Failing those, the runner-up was “Busch Gartens,” (Anhiezher Busch, aka, Budweiser), the famed beer factory with added amusement park to make it a family affair. It was there at the tender age of 5, I took my first (miraculously not last) sip of beer. Failing that, there was always the pony parking lot farm smack in the middle of the city on the corner of Pico and Beverly Glen, The Santa Monica Pier, and the arcade at Shakeys. As far as big outings, we came to Minnesota every year and went to the Fair.

O’ course back then we had no malls, no cellphones, no quick-fix stimulation the way we do now, though I’m sure my dad would have argued differently. He loathed the way we flocked to the arcade, hoarded the cotton candy, hurled our bodies around in space on obscene rides. Why couldn’t we just be content to sit?  Now I feel like I am in some sort of satire with Jude; instead of begging him to come in from the wilderness of outside, I have to bribe him to go out.

But, as we know, times they are-a-changing. I have faith that the day will come when Jude will refuse to come inside, the same way he refuses now to stop playing MineCraft on his dad’s phone.  I oughta have some faith, after all, for I’m not entirely innocent; I had my Matel’s electronic football. I played Atari. But still, very little came before swimming with the waves at the beach, or soccer, no matter how loudly they called. And they called at the top of their lungs. All the parents did. You could count on it night after night, especially during the summer, like a big city birdcall that ricocheted up and down the dark-less streets. Yesterday's dread is today's nostalgia. God, I'm getting old.

Write with me?

What place of summer amusement did you go/do as a kid year after year?

What did they call you in from as a kid?