The Friends Behind 'Love and other Mysteries,' part 4

Callie Feyen

Hello, Poetry Friend

In 2019 I took a workshop with Callie Feyen about the Hero’s Journey of Motherhood. We read poetry, novels, and picture books, and we wrote. I wrote poems, even when the assignment said to do something else, because poetry is how I process the world.

One of the texts Callie used was Jacqueline Woodson’s multi-award winning, middle grade novel in verse, Brown Girl Dreaming. I’d read it before, and I’ve read it since, but it is the Mary Ann poems, the ones about Jackie’s mother, that stick with me.

In this poem she’s boarding a bus, leaving her kids with her parents, while she works in the Big Apple, trying to scrape together enough money for a new life for them all together.

from my mother looks back on greenville

New York ahead of her,
her family behind, she moves
to the back, her purse in her lap,
the land
pulling her gaze to the window once more.
Before darkness
covers it and for many hours, there are only shadows

and stars

and tears

and hope.

–Jacqueline Woodson

Mary Ann is my mother hero. She loves the best she can. Reading her helped me write my own motherhood poems.

As I was beginning to understand what Love & other Mysteries was and what it needed, I turned to the poems I wrote in that workshop. Many of them stood up, raised their hands, and said, Pick me! Pick me! Callie helped me to write something true not only in that moment, but over the longhaul.

Here’s one of them. It’s my poem for the third Luminous Mystery, Jesus’ Proclamation of the Kingdom of God (fruit of the mystery: conversion). The genesis of this poem was a grey and black bath bomb I found in an Albertson’s in Salt Lake City. It was labeled “Apocalypse.”

GIT 'ER DONE

Daddy—I still call him that
—can you cut this bath bomb in half?

He carries away the lavender ball
from the kitchen, its knives,

out to my truck, opens the tailgate,
sets in place the delicate sphere,

all acid and bicarbonate.
First he tries a hacksaw.

Then a real saw. This job needs
trust and a chainsaw's

tractable mechanical teeth.
Once the whole severs

into sheared moons, one
in each shutting hand,

only then can conversion
fizz.

–Megan Willome

Writing Faithfully

begins September 8!

This fall and spring, Callie and I will be teaching a 9-month online writing class called Writing Faithfully. One of the books we’ll be using is Jacqueline Woodson’s Brown Girl Dreaming. We’ll also use my Love & other Mysteries.

Come with?

Happy poeming!

Megan