Prompt 267. In a New Light

& the poet Katie Farris on wonder

Hi friend,

The side table in this photograph sits in the living room of my farmhouse, right next to my couch. I spend a fair amount of time on said couch, so I see this table all the time, to the point that I don’t actually see it anymore. But a few days ago, the sight of the morning sun on this concrete planter and the tendrils sprouting from the woman’s head struck me still. It filled me with awe.

Later I realized that this moment felt like a perfect embodiment of what sparks my creative process: the experience of wonder. It’s being stopped in my tracks by something I see, something I hear, something I read. It’s a question that suddenly and then persistently intrudes at the edges of my mind. Sometimes I welcome the question; other times, I don’t really want to invite it in, either because it might reveal something uncomfortable, or because the question feels too big, too insurmountable, too unanswerable. And yet when I begin to make something with it, be it an essay or a painting, I sense a shift. Like twisting a prism, the light falls in a new way, allowing a different or deeper understanding, giving me a sense of agency, if only artistically.

My beloved friend Max Ritvo was a master of this. Certainly in his poems, but even in casual conversation, he was always grappling with the realities of illness and finding an image such that I’d never look at that thing in the same way—like how I’ll never think of scanxiety simply as scanxiety, but as eating a pizza sprinkled with pepper flakes and wondering if the pepper flakes are crawling mites. It was an impulse driven by a wild and brilliant imagination, but also as a kind of protest. As Louise Glück, who was Max’s teacher and whom I had the honor of meeting at Max’s wedding, once said, “Writing is a kind of revenge against circumstance too: bad luck, loss, pain. If you make something out of it, then you’ve no longer been bested by these events.”

The same can be said of today’s guest contributor. In her memoir-in-poems Standing in the Forest of Being Alive, Katie Farris renders the experience of a breast cancer diagnosis at 36 with poignancy, humor, and originality. It’s a stunning example of refusing to be bested by circumstance, and instead, as Katie writes in one poem, to “train myself to find in the midst of hell/ what isn’t hell.”

As humans, we are full of contradictions. We have the capacity for so much goodness, and we also can be terribly cruel. But when I become cynical about humanity, focusing only on our worst tendencies, I begin to feel powerless, and it makes it hard to get out of bed. So to resist that cynicism, to plant a little seed of hope, I’m sharing Katie’s poem, “Outside Atlanta Cancer Center,” and a prompt inspired by it. May it be a reminder: to seek and find wonder.

Sending love,

Suleika

Some Items of Note—

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Three Men Walking, Alberto Giacometti (c. 1950)/via Getty

Prompt 267. Outside Atlanta Cancer Center by Katie Farris

I return to this point of wonder:

what kind of animal began to stand
on such small feet? And only two?
What vertical absurdity!
What upright madness!

Perhaps we were imitating the trees—
lifting our arms,
wishing for roots—
and then forgot to set ourselves back down on our four, more
								rational feet—

Our longing grew our fingers longer,
twigs into branches—
for if you long hard enough,
do you not find fruit
in your palms?

I return to this point of wonder.
.

Your prompt for the week:

Write about something that you find wondrous. Something strange, beautiful, unlikely, or all of the above. If you’d like, use this as an entry point: “I return to this point of wonder.”

Today’s Contributor—

Katie Farris is the author of the memoir-in-poems, Standing in the Forest of Being Alive, which was listed as a Publisher’s Weekly’s Top 10 Poetry Books for 2023. She is also the author of the hybrid-form text boysgirls, and the chapbooks A Net to Catch My Body in its Weaving, Thirteen Intimacies, and Mother Superior in Hell. She is co-translator of several books of poetry from Ukrainian, French, Chinese, and Russian, most recently, The Country Where Everyone’s Name is Fear, Translations of Lydmila and Boris Khersonsky. She graduated with an MFA from Brown University and teaches poetry at Princeton University.

For more paid subscriber benefits, see—

• On Wonder, an interview with the best-selling author Jedidiah Jenkins, where we talked about speaking our dreams into existence and the ongoing adventure of becoming

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