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Nynke Passi leads this journey of revelment in the moon, this timeless effigy of love and loss, beauty and contemplation. She will share from her own work and the work of great contemporary poets and writers as a leaping off point for prompts, writing time, and sharing. This is a workshop to help you see more keenly inside and outside of yourself, connecting to the night's eye. Nynke knows how to hold safe space for a journey into the difficult and beautiful, raw, tender places in a manner that empowers, relieves, transforms, and redeems.

The Moon was but a Chin of Gold

A Night or two ago –

And now she turns Her perfect Face

Upon the World below –

- Emily Dickinson, from "The Moon was but..."

"After this session, I am no longer afraid to write about the moon!" - Tamlin Day

About Soul Bone™ Literary Center

Soul Bone™ intersects writing with creative process, spirituality, social justice, and healing in tiny, winged courses that lift the spirit.  Soul Bone™ is founded and directed by Nynke Passi, who also is the director of MIU's MFA in Creative Writing.

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Read Dorianne Laux's "Moon in the Window" by clicking the link above or here.

Bonus Prompt 3:

Write down your memories about seeing the moon as a child, perhaps as you were falling asleep alone in bed, perhaps on a camping trip, perhaps standing outside with a family member in the yard who told you about the moon, perhaps in your first romantic moment as a teen, perhaps with friends kicking around the ball in the street until dusk when the moon was rising. Describe in images what you perceived. Keep it short. A poem or hybrid piece.

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I wish I could say I was the kind of child

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Read "Facts about the Moon" by Dorianne Laux.

Facts About the Moon
by Dorianne Laux

The moon is backing away from us
an inch and a half each year. That means
if you’re like me and were born
around fifty years ago the moon
was a full six feet closer to the earth.
What’s a person supposed to do?
I feel the gray cloud of consternation
travel across my face. I begin thinking
about the moon-lit past, how if you go back
far enough you can imagine the breathtaking
hugeness of the moon, prehistoric
solar eclipses when the moon covered the sun
so completely there was no corona, only
a darkness we had no word for.
And future eclipses will look like this: the moon
a small black pupil in the eye of the sun.
But these are bald facts.
What bothers me most is that someday
the moon will spiral right out of orbit
and all land-based life will die.
The moon keeps the oceans from swallowing
the shores, keeps the electromagnetic fields
in check at the polar ends of the earth.
And please don’t tell me
what I already know, that it won’t happen
for a long time. I don’t care. I’m afraid
of what will happen to the moon.
Forget us. We don’t deserve the moon.
Maybe we once did but not now
after all we’ve done. These nights
I harbor a secret pity for the moon, rolling
around alone in space without
her milky planet, her only child, a mother
who’s lost a child, a bad child,
a greedy child or maybe a grown boy
who’s murdered and raped, a mother
can’t help it, she loves that boy
anyway, and in spite of herself
she misses him, and if you sit beside her
on the padded hospital bench
outside the door to his room you can’t not
take her hand, listen to her while she
weeps, telling you how sweet he was,
how blue his eyes, and you know she’s only
romanticizing, that she’s conveniently
forgotten the bruises and booze,
the stolen car, the day he ripped
the phones from the walls, and you want
to slap her back to sanity, remind her
of the truth: he was a leech, a fuckup,
a little shit, and you almost do
until she lifts her pale puffy face, her eyes
two craters and then you can’t help it
either, you know love when you see it,
you can feel its lunar strength, its brutal pull.

-Dorianne Laux, Facts About the Moon: Poem

Bonus Prompt 2:

Research facts about the moon and then write a poem or hybrid piece called "Facts about the Moon." Use Dorianne Laux' poem as an inspiration.

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Above and here you can find our upcoming offerings in Eventbrite! We have partial and full scholarships for every session for those who register early. If you really want to attend and can't afford the fee, contact us at soulboneliterary@gmail.com.

If you are interested in MIU's MFA in Creative Writing, you can contact Nynke at npassi@miu.edu and check out our MFA website here. Our MIU MFA in Creative Writing Open House Series will be posted here on Eventbrite.

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Soul Bone℠ Literary Center Offerings, Summer 2023

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Soul Bone℠ intersects writing with creative process, spirituality, social justice, and healing in tiny, winged courses that lift the spirit. Connect with us at soulboneliterary@gmail.com.

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Nynke's Prompt: A Portrait of Someone as the Moon

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Nynke's Prompt: A Portrait of Someone as the Moon

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Listen to Nynke's poem "A Portrait of My Mother as the Moon" in the session.

Prompt:

Write a portrait of someone you know as the moon. Try to carry the metaphoric connections as far as you can. Be imaginative and playful, it does not matter if it does not make sense or seems too whimsical or far-fetched. Feel into the connections..

Use short tight stanzas. You can try writing each stanza with haiku-like compactness. If you write prose, pack an image tightly in each line.

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Listen to Nynke's poem "Questions for the Moon" in the session. You can also re-read the poem here or by clicking the link above.

This poem was inspired by a prompt to write questions for the moon, something many poets have done. See for example Vietnamese poet Ho Xuan Huong's "Questions for the Moon"

Prompt:

Write a poem or hybrid piece asking questions of the moon. Talk to the moon as if she were a personality with characteristics and features and a life, habits, passions, and desires you want to know more about.

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How old are you that you're permitted to wander late
nights alone? You walk in circles, tongue-

tied, coyly dropping pallid, scanty scarves
into puddles. For whom?

Are you in love, or a pilgrim seeking absolution?
How can you run so fast without feet,

without getting away?
Large dark hands push you like a tasseled pillow deep

into Sky's sequined furniture.
Large dark hands cover your body, hiding half from view.

You live in purdah or disclose a hyperbole of undress.
Your appetite seems shifty like your shape.

Does your tumescence birth stars?
How else can you slim down to a fingernail clipping?

Who polishes your lacquered skin?
The irascible, jealous Day dissolves your substance

like salt the skin of snails,
but I commend your physicians: you regenerate.

I think it is Night who practices this laying on of hands,
for why else does Night extirpate

all light but yours? My own hands can't support
the mass of your weightless urgency.

My fingers get wet reaching into the pond of time
to retrieve even one lost, elusive strand of your hair.

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How old are you that you're permitted to wander late nights alone? You walk in circles, tongue- tied, coyly dropping pallid, scanty scarves into puddles. For whom? Are you in love, or a pilgrim seeking absolution? How can you run so fast without feet, without getting away?

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Read "Moon Ghazal" by Dorianne Laux.

Moon Ghazal

By Dorianne Laux

I can’t remember the first time I saw it, seems it was

always there, even with me in the womb, the moon.

It must have been night, above the ocean, making a path

on the waves, gilded invitation, the parchment moon.

Or the day moon, see-through-y wafer over desert, caught

in the arms of saguaro, thin-skinned, heart-stuck moon.

Blue as new milk, aquarium water, Mexican tile, blue

as cold-bitten fingertips, nailbeds’ quick-blue arcs, half-moons.

How I felt when I saw my first grown boy, round-eyed,

all sinew and muscle, his calves, his biceps, plump as moons.

Buttons, doorknobs, volleyballs, clocks, egg yolk, orange

slice, violet iris, our planet a pupil, mote in the eye of the moon.

The cell inside me splitting and splitting, worm of the fetus,

tadpole, the glazed orb of the eye, my belly taut as the moon.

The blood-streaked moon of her head pushing through, moons

of the faces above me, urging me, pulling, promising the moon.

There are earthquakes on the moon, water, not geologically dead,

still acting like a planet: upheaval, turmoil, shaking her head, the moon.

When I see the earth of you I still feel moonquakes, even now, after

so many moons my round breasts swoon, your fingertips, small moons.

Source: Poetry (December 2022)

Bonus Prompt 1:

Write your own ghazal for the moon. You can find out more about the ghazal form here on Nynke's class blog (with some student examples) and here (on Poets.org).

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Nynke Salverda Passi is the director of MIU's MFA program and co-chair of the English dept. She is also the founder and director of the Soul Bone℠ Literary Center and Festival. She was born and raised in the Netherlands. Her work has been published in CALYX, Gulf Coast, Poetry Breakfast, Life & Legends, and more. Her poetry has been anthologized in Pandemic Puzzle Pieces and River of Earth & Sky (Blue Light Press), Carrying the Branch (Glass Lyre Press), and Oxygen: Parables of the Pandemic (River Paw Press). Together with Rustin Larson and Christine Schrum, she edited the poetry collection Leaves by Night, Flowers by Day.

Testimonials

"Every single event [of the Soul Bone Literary Festival] influenced my thinking about my own work. Right out of the gate with Nynke and Jennifer. Holy mother of all things beautiful! I was never so excited and proud to have these two women as my mentors and teachers. I remember after I heard each of them read their poems, I thought 'I hit the jack pot of professionalism!' Immediately, they opened the door of vulnerability for all the students and participants. After that, I felt there was no holding back the flood gates that wished to pour from me."

- Jennifer Sheena

"Nynke Passi and Jennifer Espinoza made a fabulous team! Your master workshops on Writing the Wound and Writing toward Healing inspired me to create my own poem concerning a traumatic incident. I had trouble writing about it, but this time, with your positivity and support, I came up with something. I think what really did the trick was y’all saying that all of us have different traumas and it’s ok to feel how we feel. I am so grateful for your supportive space and your grace. You both have an incredible creative energy that is phenomenal to be around (even on Zoom)."

- Jennifer Grant

"Nynke is a talented writer who have that rare ability to inspire others to write often and well.."

- Jim Turner

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"Of Trees, Tenderness, and the Moon: Hasui Kawase's Stunning Japanese Woodblock Prints from the 1920s - 1950s" from The Marginalian.

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"After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, love, and so on - have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear - what remains?" the aging Walt Whitman asked in his diary as he contemplated what makes life worth living while recovering from a paralytic stroke, then answered: "Nature remains... the trees, fields, the changes of seasons - the sun by day and the stars of heaven by night."

A century after Whitman's birth, on the other side of a globe newly disillusioned with its own humanity after the First World War, a young Japanese man was embarking on a life of celebrating the inexhaustible consolations of nature in uncommonly poetic visual art.

Born into a Tokyo family of rope and thread merchants, Hasui Kawase (May 18, 1883-November 7, 1957) grew up dreaming of becoming an artist. His parents pressed him to continue in their path, but he persisted in following his own, drawing quiet inspiration from the example of his maternal uncle - the creator of the first manga magazine.

He did take over the family business, but he was moonlighting in art while running it - sketching from nature, copying one master's woodblock prints, learning brush painting from another.

When the business went bankrupt in the early twentieth century, the twenty-six-year-old Kawase devoted himself wholly to art, applying to apprentice with one of the great masters of transitional Japanese woodblock printing. The master rejected him, encouraging him to broaden his sensibility and to develop his style by studying Western painting first. The young man obliged.

Two years later, he applied again.

The master accepted him, conferring upon him the lyrical name Hasui - an ideogram of his family name fused with the name of his boyhood school, most closely translated translated as "water springing from the source."

Hasui was thirty-five - the age Whitman was when he staggered the world with his Leaves of Grass - when he made his artistic debut with a series of experimental woodblock prints, depicting the mostly empty streets of Tokyo and the unpeopled landscapes of the countryside.

As he began his next series, nature and night beckoned to him more and more .

And then, on an otherwise ordinary Saturday the autumn after his fortieth birthday, the convergence boundary between two tectonic plates deep in the body of the Earth ruptured, unleashing the Great Kantō earthquake of 1923. It leveled his workshop, destroying the finished woodblocks and fomenting in him an even more intimate sense of the sublimity of nature.

Over the next thirty-five years, Hasui became a master of shin hanga - the "new prints" movement fusing traditional Japanese art, the art of shadows, with the Western aesthetics of light and the European novelty of perspective. He went on to create several hundred consummate woodblock prints, watercolors, oil paintings, and hanging scrolls, animated by a tender reverence for the beauty and majesty of nature. One hundred of them are collected in the lavish annotated volume Visions of Japan: Kawase Hasui's Masterpieces (public library).

Hasui captured the enchantment of snowfall with especial loveliness, his intricate lines challenging the artisans he employed in carving his woodblock designs to rise to new levels of craftsmanship.

But among all of nature's beauties, nothing inspired him more than trees - those eternal muses of scientists, artists, philosophers, and poets alike - and what Margaret Fuller so unforgettably called "that best fact, the Moon."

In landscape after landscape, the majestic silhouettes of the matsu (Japan's iconic pine trees, symbols of fortitude and courage) and the sugi (the enormous old-growth cedars, symbols of power and longevity) reach into the noctrune toward the crescent and lean into the gloaming hour, backlit by the full Moon.

In the final year of his life, the Japanese government classified Hasui as a Living National Treasure. Comparable to the American National Medal of Arts and Humanities, Japan's highest civilian honor is bestowed upon those whose life's work renders them, in what may be the most poetic government certification in any language, "Preservers of Important Intangible Cultural Properties."

Complement with Japanese-American artist Chiura Obata's stunning paintings of Yosemite from the same era, then revisit a very different take on tree silhouettes from Hasui's American contemporary Art Young.

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Of Trees, Tenderness, and the Moon: Hasui Kawase's Stunning Japanese Woodblock Prints from the 1920s-1950s

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Sylvan sublimity between the heavens and the deep blue sea.