Poetry Friday: How It Is Told

Writerly Friends, it's Poetry Friday, but I've been thinking about stories.

Today's Poetry Friday host is
Kerry at Kerry Recommends

Whether we are talking about outlandish fiction like the Harry Potter books, sharing family history, or "How was your day?" over dinner, a lot of our time is spent sharing stories. Why do we read them, listen to them, tell them? 

Here is a true story:

A brilliant young person is accepted into a well-respected college. With degree in hand, the person embarks on a promising career. Feeling unfulfilled, our protagonist drops out of chasing the American Dream and opts, instead, to study Buddhism. This study becomes all-absorbing, as the person enters into monastic life as a Buddhist teacher.

The twist? This story is true for two people.

One is Sister Dang Nghiem, MD.



I read about this Zen Buddhist nun and disciple of Thich Nhat Hanh in Prevention magazine's January 2014 issue. "Sister D's" story is compelling. A Vietnamese refugee living in California, she had pushed her own difficult history aside to become a successful medical doctor. A catastrophic event led her to attend a mindfulness retreat with Thich Nhat Hahn. There, she began a different kind of life as a Buddhist nun.

The article is entitled, "The Healer." (Read it at Prevention.) It includes such subtitles as "You Can Cultivate Joy Even When You're Hurting," "Mindfulness Is Powerful Medicine," and "Kind Actions Matter." The story speaks admiringly of Sister D's  "peace, mindfulness, and clarity."

Sister D's book is published by
Parallax Press. Find it here.

But the brief story I told above is also true of another person -- a member of my family.

I won't share the details of this person's life without his permission, but: brilliant young person, Ivy college, degree, promising career -- all of these are true of him. And, like Sister D, he stepped away from everyone's expectations to become a Buddhist monk.

What made the Sister D article resonate with me so deeply was how closely her story parallels the life of the person I know, except in one respect.

How it is told.

Remember the loaded words in the Prevention article's subtitles? Joy, Mindfulness, Powerful, Kind.

When my family talks about our Buddhist monk, those are not the words I hear. This person is spoken about in other terms: Disappointment, Crazy, Kook, Threw It All Away.

At a recent gathering -- our monk was not there -- I listened to how my family was telling his story. Sister D was on my mind. I asked the speaker, our family patriarch, to look at the monk in a different way. 

I asked, "Hasn't he been doing this for twenty years?"

What I meant was, our monk isn't a crazy twenty-something who's throwing his college degree away to live like a kooky Buddhist and disappoint his family. He is a grown man who leads a peaceful life, even if that life is one the rest of us struggle to relate to.

At the top of this post, I asked all of us to think about why we read, listen to, and tell stories. This experience answers some of that question for me.

We tell stories to understand life and the world around us. The way we describe an experience shapes and is shaped by how we feel about what happened. Sometimes, as with my family, we need to stop telling the story in a way that has become habitual, and create a new narrative.

As writers for children, it is our responsibility to be aware of the power not only of story (plot), but of how it is told (word choice and tone). The words we use as storytellers profoundly shape young readers' and listeners' points of view.

Here is a poem for Poetry Friday, "Call Me by My True Names" by Thich Nhat Hahn

Call Me by My True Names

Do not say that I'll depart tomorrow
because even today I still arrive.

Look deeply: I arrive in every second
to be a bud on a spring branch,
to be a tiny bird, with wings still fragile,
learning to sing in my new nest,
to be a caterpillar in the heart of a flower,
to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone.

I still arrive, in order to laugh and to cry,
in order to fear and to hope.
The rhythm of my heart is the birth and
death of all that are alive.

I am the mayfly metamorphosing on the surface of the river,
and I am the bird which, when spring comes, arrives in time
to eat the mayfly.

I am the frog swimming happily in the clear pond,
and I am also the grass-snake who, approaching in silence,
feeds itself on the frog.

I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones,
my legs as thin as bamboo sticks,
and I am the arms merchant, selling deadly weapons to Uganda.

I am the twelve-year-old girl, refugee on a small boat,
who throws herself into the ocean after being raped by a sea pirate,
and I am the pirate, my heart not yet capable of seeing and loving.

I am a member of the politburo, with plenty of power in my hands,
and I am the man who has to pay his "debt of blood" to, my people,
dying slowly in a forced labor camp.

My joy is like spring, so warm it makes flowers bloom in all
walks of life.
My pain if like a river of tears, so full it fills the four oceans.

Please call me by my true names,
so I can hear all my cries and laughs at once,
so I can see that my joy and pain are one.

Please call me by my true names,
so I can wake up,
and so the door of my heart can be left open,
the door of compassion.


Thich Nhat Hanh

Thich Nhat Hanh gives a beautiful reading of the poem in this YouTube clip.



This is a lot to think about, Writerlies. I welcome your feedback.

30 Habits of Highly Effective Poets: Drinking Tea

Many poets write about their obsession with coffee. I, however, am a tea drinker. Not any tea. It has to be good, strong British tea with milk and a little sugar, first thing in the AM.

Where did I acquire this habit? From my mother, who grew up in Nottingham England. Her childhood home was Forest House -- so-named for Sherwood Forest.

Forest House was torn down years ago. My mother's room was next to the train tracks.

I have lovely memories of tea time at my English grandparents' home, The Old Rectory. Visits there were rare (every 18 months or so) and always amazing. Which is why I didn't realize until I was older that my wonderful grandmother wasn't wonderful to all of her grandchildren. We had special status.

To make up for my April Fool's trick this morning, here is a poem of mine with some strong British tea.

Baba Yaga 

by Laura Shovan

What I loved about you, really, was your house.

We traveled the dirt road,

waiting for a glimpse of roof,
the familiar glint of sun on window.
The door, enormous and heavy,
belonged on a church.
Even I, the eldest, could not open it myself.
 
We explored the tiny room on the third floor
where I thought a crazy lady slept,
poked at the old gray parrot
who said your name in Grandpa’s voice
and liked the taste of children’s fingers,
warmed ourselves by the wide iron stove
that glowed charcoal all day long,
waiting, like the fairy tale,
for a plump and curious child.

Mornings, all three of us had tea in your bed.

The covers were filled with feathers.
Without your whalebone corset
you were powdery soft.
There were biscuits to eat.
Even Grandpa was friendly.

How easily we were trapped.

You pinched and prodded the other children,
who wisely kept their distance.
Your crooked pinkie finger
scolds them in their memories:
our grandmother the witch.

We recognize you now,

we who you favored and fooled.
Your back is turned to us
and the old iron stove is burning.


This poem was first published in Paterson Literary Review. It also appears in my chapbook, Mountain, Log, Salt and Stone.

Those of you who know the story of Baba Yaga can guess the other half of my heritage. My father is from a family of European Jews, all of whom had come to U.S. by the early 1930s. Baba Yaga is a folk tale witch. She shares many qualities with the nasty old woman in the story of Hansel and Gretel.

Katya Arnold's book on Baba Yaga

I write out of my heritage, my family story, quite a bit. In a way, that is a writing ritual -- returning to family history as a source for ideas.