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:

Writing From The Inside Out

Next Read-Around is 10/16/25 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

Rituals of greeting and parting our part of our every day exchanges with people we meet. Some are strangers we may never see again, in which case a goodbye may be permanent. But in most of our interactions with acquaintances, friends, and loved ones, parting is  just a temporary interruption in our ongoing interaction. In those cases, we may acknowledge the continuity with the equivalent of “see you later”. But there are cases in which a permanent goodbye may be necessary in order to acknowledge an ending to a relationship or to a previous form of a relationship. Thomas Dooley said he wrote the poem I Could Let You Go to “imagine a ritual for saying goodbye” that could become “something more, something sturdy, like a vessel that could hold and carry away something heavy.“

I Could Let You Go

as if opening a crepe sail
on a raft of linden
downriver with no
glacial cut swerve down
soft like bourbon if I could
ask the waters then
to chop to shake
an apology when you cry
I feel a wet bank in me
ring dry here I’ll wrap you
in the piano shawl from the upright
to your fists a spray
of dandelion and comb my last
compassion to grasp.
Goodbye, friend. Willows
dip to your lips
dew from their leafed
digits feast now
on the cold blue soup
of sky the iron from bankwater
gilts your blood I’ll break
a bottle on your gunwale
and read broken
poems from the shore
as the dark river
curls back white from the cheap timber
as if letting what’s made to drift
drift.

—Thomas Dooley l

Prompt Ideas

  1. Journal or write a poem about a fairy tale you loved as a child. How does that story relate to your present life?

  2. Journal or write a poem describing a story you have climbed inside and lived it from the inside.

  3. Think of a time when you believed in your own story and it prevented you from seeing problems

  4. In the first stanza, Shu Ting nests the decay of everyday things in a cosmic landscape. In the third stanza, she does the opposite, nesting the tiny suns —the cosmic— in everyday things. Use a similar contrasting structure to compose your writing.

  5. Journal or write a poem about a time when your heart was tiny and the world seemed vast and a time when the world was tiny and your heart seemed vast.

  6. While outside in the world, take note of three to five things you see or hear that open your heart and three to five things that close your heart. Then, with those sights and sounds in mind, write about what heartens you and what disheartens you.

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