If you wish to attend the read around (t’s free, fun, a great way to share, and reading a poem is optional). Note: If you registered already, you do not need to register again, simply use the link sent to you in your confirmation email. Register Here:

Next Read-Around is 8/14/25 at 5:00 PM PST

How It Works:

  1. Read the poem 

  2. Do your own reflection on it, noting what it inspires in you

  3. Feel free to use your own reflection as your prompt or…

  4. Use the selection of prompts below

  5. Pick one that inspires you and write (feel free to use only one or write several poems using different prompts) or…

  6. Don’t use any of the provided prompts and follow your inspiration from wherever it comes

My Thoughts

I am often on the lookout for writing prompts and a good source is common idioms. Idiom comes from the Greek “idios,” meaning “personal and private” and, as idioma, iteventually came to be applied more narrowly to peculiar phrases used in every day conversation like "in a nutshell," or "it's complicated," or "the thing is,” each of which offers a prompt to go in any direction that you wish from the initial kernel. As an idiom, “The Thing Is” typically highlights a problem or challenge about a topic or concern. Ellen Bass’ poem, The Thing Is, does just that with love. How can we continue to love when faced with the depths of grief to which love, itself, inevitably plunges us? Even though grief seems universally conjoined with love, its idiomatic manifestation will always be deeply personal and private.

The Thing Is

to love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it
and everything you’ve held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, its tropical heat
thickening the air, heavy as water
more fit for gills than lungs;
when grief weights you down like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief,
you think, “How can a body withstand this?”
Then you hold life like a face
between your palms, a plain face,
no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again.

Ellen Bass
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/ellen-bass

Prompt Ideas

  1. Journal or write a poem titled, The Thing Is…

  2. Journal or write a poem about what you believe is required to love life.

  3. Consider something that you cannot “stomach” in the world or in life and write about it and how you deal with it.

  4. Journal or write a poem using the imagery of grief sitting with you.

  5. Bass likens the weight of grief as a bodily obesity. Describe the bodily weight of grief or of any other emotion that might manifest as a bloating.

  6. Journal or write as if you were holding your life as a face between your palms.

  7. Pick any other idiom that you choose and use it as the title for your writing

  8. Write about anything in the poem or in life that inspires you.