If you laugh, you think, and you cry, that’s a full day. That’s a heck of a day. You do that seven days a week, you’re going to have something special. – Jim Valvano
The Laughter of Women
Lisel Mueller
The laughter of women sets fire
to the Halls of Injustice
and the false evidence burns
to a beautiful white lightness
It rattles the Chambers of Congress
and forces the windows wide open
so the fatuous speeches can fly out
The laughter of women wipes the mist
from the spectacles of the old;
it infects them with a happy flu
and they laugh as if they were young again
Prisoners held in underground cells
imagine that they see daylight
when they remember the laughter of women
It runs across water that divides,
and reconciles two unfriendly shores
like flares that signal the news to each other
What a language it is, the laughter of women,
high-flying and subversive.
Long before law and scripture
we heard the laughter, we understood freedom.
As March came to a close and national poetry month approached, we spent our last group under the theme of sisterhood. What is it that binds people together? What is it that we remember over meals or in classrooms? When I come home and tell stories, it is most often that I’m trying to retell a joke and can’t get through the story without laughing. Because that is what binds us: laughter. A joke is often built on what surprises us – a twist of words, a turn of phrase, a clever answer to a question we didn’t know how to ask. A joke opens and we lift our foot, poised in a space of uncertainty. The punchline is the firm ground we come down on together.
This week we focused, first, on the poem above to remind ourselves of the power of laughter and groups bonding together. Then we played improv games to exercise this common strength, bind our group, create safe space, and just laugh it out. Almost everyone participated in improv games. We used common rules of group improv including “yes, and” – the concept that anything that one player suggests is supported by the group so that the group can continue to create comedy together. This is not dissimilar to the agreements within our writing group. As we write and share, our words are received with a continual “yes, and” encouraging one another to explore the uncharted territories in our thinking and feeling Continue reading
WRITING INSIDE VT 