New motto

+ the C-SPAN event!

In 1966, the artist Yoko Ono exhibited “Ceiling Painting” in London (image is above). To view the painting, the viewer climbed to the top of a white ladder. Waiting at the top was a magnifying glass, hung on a chain from a frame on the ceiling. Holding the magnifying glass and looking through the frame, the viewer would read the word “YES” in tiny block letters.

Lore has it that this is how John Lennon came to know Ono’s work. He was attracted to the positivity. Relieved, he later said.

In the past few weeks I’ve had the pleasure of reading and talking with Sylvester at a number of public events. We had a great conversation with Dr. Freddie Parker and the Orange County Remembrance Coalition, and with Andrew Artis, co-owner of Bound and Vine, a lovely and welcoming new wine bar and bookstore in Fayetteville where we met a diverse and passionate community of readers.

My new motto comes from Sylvester, who has been asked a few times about how we decided to work together, or how, having never written a book before, he decided to do it. Sylvester usually tells the story of protesting in Graham in 2020, meeting me through some of the reporting I was doing about that, and then inviting me to his play, The Spirit of Wyatt Outlaw. Soon after that, he says, I asked him to coffee and proposed writing the book.

Let me say yes before I say no, Sylvester remembers thinking.

I like the way that the motto is internal, something that is in conversation with the part of your self that may be scared, uncertain. Not that you say yes to everything. But there are enough places giving advice about how to say no.

Maybe a better question is how we say yes to the things that feel outside-our-experience, new, compelling. The big leaps.

Let me say yes before I say no.

On my way into Fayetteville I saw a small group of protesters holding hand-lettered cardboard signs at a tiny intersection of several busy roads. I didn’t get all the signs but one read “Stop the war.” I missed my turn I was so surprised, though I shouldn’t have been. Why shouldn’t people in a military town be opposed to unnecessary, unplanned wars of choice and devastation?

But they were not in a space that was easy to protest, physically or otherwise. Cars and trucks rolled by on every side. Probably some drivers yelled things. Positive and otherwise. The protesters knew that, going in. There were only five or six people: what can five or six people do? One of those protesters may have been asked by a friend to join and may have hesitated, but then they said yes.

This is how the 2020 protests in Graham started. Someone had an idea, and someone else said yes.

The next month is going to be extremely busy at the FTT HQ, because I have said yes to so many things: a teach in on Tuesday about workers’ rights, a trip to Southern California to celebrate my MFA program’s anniversary, a trip to Boston to read at Porter Square Books. My students are making a print journal of their students’ work, and we will have to find a way to print and distribute it. At home I’m working on a huge native plant garden with the help of my genius friend Deena at Word and Plant (more on that soon). I am looking forward to all of it.

Yes to more gardens, bigger than you think you can handle.

Yes to climbing.

Yes to trips to see old and new friends.

Yes to protests. Yes to read-ins in support of libraries.

Yes to opening book stores in military towns. And to going to read at them.

Yes to books. Yes to poetry!

My friend Elaine Bleakney will read at this event with Marianne Gingher next Saturday, April 11, in Durham. It’s free! You should come and get Elaine’s new book, Take the Exit then Exit! I bet she will sign it.

Also you should get a copy my friend and colleague Chelsea Krieg’s beautiful new poetry collection, Everything Is Water. Chelsea says I was the first person (!) to tell her that she writes eco poetry. Listen to her wonderful poem, “Before I knew what it meant,” written after a residency in Cape Charles, Virginia:

And here, finally, is our C-SPAN event, streamable! Lots more wisdom from Sylvester in there.

Happy Easter and love to you, Frog Troublers. What are you saying yes to lately?