Update - Three More Days Left!
Wonderful news! Thanks to very generous donations by many of you, I've just surpassed my goal. Hurray! I'm so looking forward to attending the Write-A-Thon next weekend, and I'm pleased that I've been able to help an organization I care deeply about. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.
If you haven't yet made your donation, it's not too late! Although I've reached my personal goal, the NYWC set a goal of raising a total of $25,000 - and they're about 87% of the way there. Any additional contributions I raise will go towards helping NYWC meet their goal (and, it will help me stay up there as one of this year's top fundraisers!). So - if you've been meaning to make a donation to NYWC, now's your chance! No amount is too small.
I've been making goals for myself of what I want to accomplish on Saturday:
1) Polish my manuscript to ready it for sending out to publislhers
2) Revise 8 new-ish poems
3) Write 3 drafty-drafts of brand-new poem
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Dearest friends and family,
Yesterday, one girl in my creative writing workshop at the Arab American Family Center wrote this sentence: "I love my school."
Now, while this is not the world's most stunning sentence, it was pretty amazing to me.
This girl has refused to speak to me - let alone write - for almost three months. If I were uprooted from my home and trying to survive in a new country with a new language, I don't know that I'd feel like writing poems, either.
But yesterday, because of some magical combination of persistence, luck, and inspiration, she decided to express her thoughts on paper. And I was thrilled!
I've been leading writing workshops with the NY Writers Coalition for about six years, and it's one of my greatest joys. I get to share my passion of writing to groups of people who don't often have a chance to have their voices heard and creativity taken seriously.
Can you help me meet my goal of raising $1000?
Many of you have supported me in past Write-A-Thons, and I'm asking for your support again this year. I'm going to write my a** off on June 11 - nothing but writing all day! (Oh, and occasionally eating bagels, drinking coffee, and talking to other writers. That's part of writing too, right?!)
It's a lot of money, and not very much time, but I feel confident that all of you - all my loved ones and dear friends, and yes, even my facebook friends I've never met in person - will help me get there! No amount is too small.
Your pledges will help NYWC continue to offer more than 1,000 free, unique and powerful creative writing workshops each year for the homeless and formerly homeless, at-risk, and economically disadvantaged young people, seniors, war veterans, the incarcerated and formerly incarcerated, cancer survivors and many others. Check out some of their writings in the latest issue of NYWC online literary magazine, Dig Deep (including two from the workshop I lead now).
I think it's vital that NYWC's work continues, and I hope that you will join me in supporting this wonderful organization.
As a thank you for reading this far, and in anticipation of your support, I'd like to share this poem I wrote, shortly after I started the workshop at the Arab American Family Center. Enjoy!
A journey as errant as rain
I wrote "dear journey." Nirmeen said, who’s he? and I said, maybe it’s a she. Anood asked, how to spell “I love you,” and Saif wrote a secret with his code of vowels and the letter n.
The edge they press against. Language to become a place of enter.
At nine, I was no bigger than these children and like them held two languages in my body. Now I’ve absorbed one into my skeleton, lost the other to rust and salt, and still, I’m shorter than the thirteen-year old in the room.
But we are all impossibly huge next to the marks we make on paper.
I say, what if writing is dreaming together? On the board: "Water astonishingly difficult altogether." I tell them a lady long dead who once lived in France wrote it, knowing language could be far more astonishing than anyone else imagined. She held the wild weight of each word as if it were the oddest child. I say, what if we are all strangers to language every time we begin? Word by word we travel –
word by word we set it down: a poem so wet it runs.
In peace and poetry,
Tamiko
P.S. Don't forget to forward this to anyone who you think might want to donate too! Thanks again.