Endings and Beginnings

We finished the giant work project that has been consuming so much of my brain space for the last three months. We finished it, in fact, a full day early. I am exceedingly grateful for the massive effort made by the team I work with. There were more than a few times in the last weeks when I wasn’t sure we would reach this place, wasn’t sure we would finish, but here we are.

I spent the evening on zoom working with Fox, my sister, mapping out a project that she and I will be undertaking. I feel as if she and I have just completed a couple of months of pre-reading activities and are about the dive into the book at last. (Today is also Fox’s birthday!}

Today is the last day of the 2021 edition of the Slice of Life Story Challenge. It’s been a long and often difficult slicing month for me. Yes, I’ve posted something every day, but I haven’t been as much a participant in the community as I usually am, and I’ve missed that. I haven’t had the strength to join in, all my energy sapped by work. I’ve missed catching up with some of my favorite veteran slicers, missed getting to discover new slicers. The end to this year’s challenge feels too soon, too soon.

And tomorrow is the start of National Poetry Month, the start of my 2021 poetry 30/30. I had thought I would give this month to exploring the pantoum again, but I’ve changed my mind. I was zooming with my friend Sonia (aka Red Emma) last night for our biweekly writing date, and she introduced me to a form I’d never heard of, the “Golden Shovel.” Apparently, poet Terrance Hayes created this form as an homage to Gwendolyn Brooks. The idea is to take a line from a poem or other text and use each work in the line as the end of a line in your poem. Hayes’ idea was to do this using lines from Gwendolyn Brooks’ poems. Sonia learned about the Golden Shovel in a NYTimes article that introduced a twist on the form: use, instead of a line of poetry, a headline from a news story. Sonia’s going to do a 30/30 using the headline version of the Golden Shovel. And I’m going to do the Golden Shovel, too … but I’m going to use lines from Lucille Clifton poems. We’ll see how it goes.

And maybe, if I don’t chicken out, I’ve got another couple of beginnings on the horizon for April. We’ll see how they all play out.

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It’s the 14th annual Slice of Life Story Challenge!
Head on over to Two Writing Teachers
and see what the rest of this year’s slicers are up to!