Writer Circle Prompt: Something about Woman

 

Mom and Grandmother

All my life, I’ve sought out the grandmothers.  Not the sugar and spice and free time grandmothers on sitcoms and in commercials, but the busy ones.  You likely had busy grandmothers as well.

My mother’s mother was the first of these in my life.  She worked as a school teacher, first in elementary school with a cart for a desk and storage area, with her own dining room as an extension.  I watched her grade artwork done on 12” by 18” paper, providing comments for each student.  By the time I was in high school, she was, too, and she became my art teacher.  I suffered jealousy when she called on others instead of me.  I experienced anger when she drew on my drawings to “correct” them.  I felt pride when she was honored by the rest of the faculty. 

Meanwhile, at home, she hired me to sew hems, to polish piano and chair legs, and to dust photographs and paintings in the vast Victorian she owned and lived in alone and unafraid.  While my mother’s job was us children, super grandmother gardened, painted, commanded, and drove us, sometimes, crazy. She never babysat without assuming we were a work force.

Away from home, I found myself drawn to this type of grandmother figure.  I adopted them, old women with public and private strength, witches in another time and place, with magic names as my mentors and role models.

One was Mary Hunter Wolf, who led improv workshops through her very own Shakespeare theatre in Connecticut.  Her names all had power.  Mary was my grandmother’s name, and both Hunter and Wolf carried a mythic sense with them.

Another was Ellen Stewart of LaMama Experimental Theatre Club, the Mama of off-off Broadway and the champion of international diversity on stage.  When she spoke at conferences on non-traditional casting, she emphasized the importance of making spaces for theatre from non-European sources, not trying to rewrite white plays.  La Mama stages and rehearsal halls were full of theater from other countries as well as ours.  She herself employed international casts—and their languages—in Shakespearean and ancient Greek plays.   At home in La Mama, she and everyone else pitched in to do the work.  One story about her has a woman asking her about the artistic director of La Mama while she was cleaning the toilets in the lobby restroom.

Rather than explain all my grandmothers—the Marys and Ellens, and Bernices and Sojourners, and radicals, and women in high government offices and everyday neighborhoods, let me say that I longed to be a grandmother of the adopted kind, as I had no children of my own.  I can’t remember if was the writer Tony Morrison or the historian and musician Bernice Reagon who told me long ago, that the first thing she did on taking up residence in a new town was to adopt a grandmother for her son—and for herself.  I don’t know if she meant the busy kind.  But I did the same until very recently when I chose a retirement community with bunches of grandmothers with stories to tell.  I have aged into being a grandmother, too, and I’m ripe for adoption.  I’m no longer active in society, but I have stories to tell.

Writers Circle Prompt: Relationship with animals

 

The cats of my life 

by Susan Chast

1.
My two bonded adult black cats take days
to come out from under the furniture.
Why should they trust this new household as home
after five years of insecurity?
 
How to forgive them for not loving me
immediately?  How to be patient?
 
They mirror my reactions to bad breaks  
that hold me lonely and isolated
under the furniture of my own life
I’ve hewn from pine and built sound and strong.
 
How can I learn to love them
unconditionally?  How to be patient?
 
I know distrust holds back the fullness of faith
That humility would bring if I could swim
within the stream of human relationship
once more, take off my armor and swim.
 
How to let go of survival techniques
which keep us from knowing new depths?
 
I ask the two black cats to come on out
from hiding.  Let me hold you, please, let me
be of service to you—And love me, please,
don’t make me beg.  Don’t make me wait for you.
 
How to be patient with each other’s fears? 
How to negotiate our timeliness?
 
2.
I wake to purrs, so reach out slow and smooth
not to scare the little ones at rest.
Moving my mouth, I moan in cat meter.
 
In my rare dreams, my cats answer questions
unasked while I drink their strongest potions.
We are not yours, they explain. You are ours.
 
Do I want to know?  No insist cat gods.
I yawn and stretch. I’m tired and sore, willing
to recline, decline, wink and blink and nod.
 
3.
Before the one named Sabrina opened her heart
she trained me into food types and times—
and I wrote her into a mythic wild,
one who more than a witch’s familiar
had power over me, body and soul.
She ruled.  We obeyed, her sister Mariah and me.
 
Yet in the season of her death, Sabrina
adopted me.  Her eyes glowed with thanks.
Her chest warmed mine.  She released me and her
her sister without reproach.  Before the vet
showed the mercy needle, she closed her eyes.
She lightened. She took off.  She closed her eyes.
 
And now, as if Sabrina ordered her to,
sister Mar-eye-ah circles me with love.
She brings her strings, flirts with her golden eyes,
pets me with her softness, waits patiently
in doorways for me to feed her.  I leave, but
always return. Sabrina left, but doesn’t return.
 
4.
Halloween.
Now that the trick or treaters have gone, and
I light the candles, the cats of the past stop by.
Here is Pierette who lived to be nineteen,
and Miracle who lived to be twenty-two,
the first black and white as Pierro the clown
and the second a striped tortoise shell.  They
sit still as chess pieces, just washing their paws,
while Wicca and Red, the grey and the white
kittens, swat each other, and roll on the floor.
 
The cat on my chair arm, the black Mariah,
strains to leap away and hide from the strangers. 
Her twin didn’t show up.  Mariah’s fur stands
up in the candle light, and she jumps down from the chair
the apparitions are gone, but she sniffs the floor and cries. 

5.
What do you dream, Mariah my kitty? 
What do you dream?
Do you dream a lion’s dreams, red meat ready, new each day?
How disappointed are you when I serve canned food one way?
Do you dream a panther’s dreams, wild sleek as you stalk your prey?
You know I see you stretch like that each time you and I play.
I see you poised to catch live squirrels and birds through your TV window.
I think you’d find that harder than the toys I tease you with.
I curl like you in my frequent cat naps, but still don’t know
what you dream, my dear Mariah kitty. 
What do you dream?
Thanks to you I’ve discovered I’m an animal as well.
Thanks to you I’ve climbed down from the human pedestal.
I know I wouldn’t find wild beasts friendly as a domestic cat.
Indeed, I’m sure I look and smell like food beyond this habitat.
You’ve traded down quite a lot to share a home with me,
so I hope you get pleasure from how hard I try to please.
Thank you for your purr and poise, thank you for your company.
Thank you for your claws, noise, and stare when you want snacks from me
But tell me what you dream, sweet Mariah.
Tell me what you dream.

© 2025 Susan L. Chast

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Writers Circle Prompt: Compromise

My entire life has been full of compromises, some of which I'm proud--especially those that strengthened relationships.  At the Women's Encampment for a Future of Peace and Justice, the women who built the space had much opportunity--actually much need--to compromise.  

On some things, compromise proved to be impossible.  For example, we were open to all women, but some felt a need to be surrounded by Christian crosses which they painted on signs and on tents and buildings.  Other women felt a need to be surrounded by symbols of Wiccan beliefs such as the pentacle.  The two groups dueled throughout the run of the encampment, sometimes destroying each other’s' artwork.  Conflict resolution was unable to forge a lasting peace between the two extremes.  We tried establishing different areas for crosses and for pentacles.  We tried prohibiting all religious symbolism. Both compromises were constantly violated.  We learned a lot about the beliefs that motivated the conflict, and often found companionship and even humor in times of peace.

Another area with fragile compromise was keeping the back border of the encampment--the one that bordered the army base--free from protest actions and signs.  Most of us thought we would be safer that way.  However, a few anarchist women who were against any forms of control, violated the rule by climbing the fence to enter the military base.  I was not there to see what happened when they were arrested.  I know we doubled security along that boundary.

On other things, we did better.  Since we were protesting the apparatus of war Americans established world-wide, some women objected to camping under an American flag.  Others wanted to claim the flag and attach new meaning to it.  After much discussion, the compromise was to hang the flag among homemade quilts and other flags, which showed our diversity.  We had lots of opportunities to discuss the quilts, flags, protest sins, and t-shirts that announced our differences and similarities.

Since this was an encampment for women, we asked the men we were related to and our friends to play supporting roles rather than be present on the grounds and in the actions.  This request struck everyone as fair and reasonable.  Several mothers, however, wanted to camp with their male children.  The compromise was to establish a discrete area of the campground with its own bathrooms and showers for mixed genders.  Boys were allowed up through the age of 11.  Childcare was offsite with all genders together, and men took shifts along with women caregivers.  News agencies also had to contend with the women-only encampment.  They were the ones to compromise.  We welcomed female reporters, so a few news agencies actually added women to their reporting staff.  We saw this as one of the ways the encampment made the world a better place.

Most of the compromises we made had to do with living--cooking, sleeping, security, and the actions themselves.  The encampment did not establish peace and justice in the world, but as an experiment in living it was highly successful.  We learned to live together and to negotiate, even in areas that we could not compromise.  What we all had in common was a desire to eliminate nuclear weapons and to dismantle the apparatus of war and racism.  We learned to do actions together, with women who wanted to be more aggressive making sure that other demonstrators were safe.  And in the process, we found ways to laugh and enjoy each other.

© 2025 Susan L. Chast

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Writers Circle Prompt: The Benefit of Failure

 

source

When I failed physics my senior year of high school, the worst outcome was that I didn’t rank in the top 10 of my class.  I excelled at English and Social Studies classes, so didn’t worry about failure.  In college, I focused on literature, philosophy, and English teacher preparation. To my surprise, two of my literature professors decided that I needed tutoring to improve my writing.  Otherwise, I never received below an A on papers I wrote.  I moved on through two masters and one PhD degree, and then taught as an assistant professor of theatre for two years at Wells College in NYS and six years at the College of William and Mary in Virginia when the “tenure denied” verdict came down.  Three presses had turned down my book on Ellen Stewart and LaMama Experimental Theatre Club, a rewrite of my dissertation, Place of Performance and Performance of Place.  The College of William and Mary was a publish or perish institution, so the review committee looked at my manuscript in detail.  The committee echoed the judgment of the presses: Namely, I was not critical enough as a theatre historian, that I instead advocated for Ellen Stewart and LaMaMa.  Once again, readers were critical of my writing itself, and no reader could imagine what course would require anyone to read the book.  I sent it to Ellen Stewart, who loved it, and I believe it is in the La Mama archives to this day.  It is also in the library at UC Berkeley.  But it couldn’t get me tenure.

During my dissertation research, I had worked through four revisions of the material.  Preparing it for publication was my fifth revision. Now that I had failed to publish and failed to win tenure, I was done with the book.  I taught my seventh year at William and Mary, worked one year as a visiting assistant professor of theatre at Bucknell University, and then applied to teach High School English in Philadelphia Public Schools.  Teaching in public school turned out to be the benefit of not receiving tenure.  I had thought teaching theatre was a ministry for me, and it was.  But what I had yet to learn was that the ministry was teaching, not teaching theatre.  There is a big difference.

I was hired by the first high school that interviewed me, Franklin Learning Center in Philadelphia, and the first year was rocky.  Disciplining a classroom full of students was new to me, and I nearly failed at it.  That summer, I took a course in teaching writing at the U of Penn Graduate School of Education.  Designed by the National Writing Project, the course helped teachers release the students’ voices, and helped teachers reach the diversity of students who made up any class.  Truly, teaching writing could be a subversive activity, as potentially subversive as any of the best theatre might be.   I loved it.  I went back to teach for another year at the Franklin Learning Center, and then a third, a fourth, and so on.  I taught literature and vocabulary, of course, but it was, ironically, in teaching creative and expository writing that I excelled.  I fell in love with it. 

I myself, ended up writing poetry, a genre more able to handle the passion I wanted to speak.  A few students and I formed a poetry club where we encouraged each other and held public readings.   The club and the classroom became the meetings for learning that I had only achieved before in rehearsals for dramatic performances and in improvisational theatre.  Helping students find their voice became my new calling.  My ministry wasn’t specifically to teach theatre, but to teach students skills they needed to learn.

Two side notes:

• The chair of the W&M theatre department told me he sent out his manuscript 23 times before it found a publisher.
• I only started writing narrative non-fiction again for the Simpson House Writers Circle.

© 2025 Susan L. Chast

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Writers Circle Prompt: The Art of the Possible

 

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Second draft:

It turns out that the art of the possible isn’t about art at all.  It’s about political pragmatism.  Politicians are said to use it when they give up long range goals to take up the goals that are possible in their time and place. For example, Republicans spent 40+ years with small local goals that led finally to the larger goal of electing a president who would dismantle the liberal state and democracy.  And that is where we are.  A friend tells me that in the long sweep of time, Trump’s presidency will be a tiny thing.  Don’t sweat it, she says.  Live in joy.

I hope living in joy continues to be possible.

My mother found joy even though she lived in places that were abhorrent to her—like the 2-room apartment in her mother’s house.   Her joy came from the constant crafting she did.  She made my clothes, and with the scraps and the materials from old clothes, she pieced crazy quilts.  I still have one of them.  She made all the ornaments for our Christmas trees—or Chanuka bush as she called it the year she decorated with dreidels and stars of David made from papier mâché and cardboard, turquoise and silver paint.  Another year, she embroidered the bottom cups of egg carton’s together to make little lanterns with tassels.  She hooked rugs.  She sketched and drew all of us indoors, and painted from the great outdoors.

It was an art of my mother’s that she saw possibility in everything, an art I picked up from her and used in my career as an educational theatre director. My first love, mime, included anything that could be imagined and shaped out of air. And student imagination in groups and alone expanded anything I could think of.  For example, with few props and added dialogue, they made their audiences think about abortion and eating meat.  They accomplished the first by putting cords in audience member’s hands attached to cloaked figures in embryo-like positions.  The embryos talked to each other about their hopes for birth. When the show was over and it was time to let go of the cords, audience members weren’t so quick to let go.  They accomplished the second by having wolf characters go into a restaurant setting and admire the human head trophies on the wall.  When they started to order, one of them objected to eating humans.  They were invited, not too politely, to leave the restaurant.  You can imagine that I had to stretch my own beliefs to applaud the creativity of these performances.  The only limit to creativity and imagination was the ability of human bodies, hearts, and minds.

Fully-staged full-length theatrical realism left less room for the imagination.  Yet, added technology and lights with less realistic settings allowed the art of the possible to include theatrical magic.  Once again, anything seemed possible.  In staging the ancient Greek play Helen by Sophocles, choral dance commented on the action and extended it into dream and possible futures.  Masks allowed actors to play multiple characters.   Huge Bread and Butter style puppets allowed us to create the illusion of gods come to earth.  In productions of Shakespeare and Angels in America, less was always more—in props, in settings, and in costumes.  Light and shadow became real characters.

One could argue that like the political definition of the Art of the Possible, each of these production situations used only what was possible in its time and place.  Yet using the resources of their day in combination with imagination led to images which might otherwise be inconceivable and impossible. Theatre—and by extension, film—expands the definition of the Art of the Possible.

[Science fiction and fantasy does the same on the page and in film, without the restrictions of human bodies and sets.  A human meets a friendly extraterrestrial and enters a whole new world of possibility in which the imagination expands in characters and in readers.  For example, think of Mary Poppins and Star Wars.   Think of the interior worlds in Hitchcock’s Spellbound and Vincente Minelli's An American In Paris (Gershwin).]

In fact, it is one of the jobs of the arts and creative writing to expand what politicians might think of as the art of the possible.  Inventions have been expanded by what was made visible in science fiction.  Visions of possible interactions and futures—in all of the arts—are essential for reimagining the state of our institutions and our society.  Even from a childhood of limited resources, a child used to invention can imagine expanding the art of the possible.  And building from that place, find joy.

First draft:

I.

It turns out that the art of the possible isn’t about art at all.  It’s about political pragmatism.  Politicians are said to use it when they give up long range goals to take up the goals that are possible given their time and place. For example, Republicans spent 40+ years with small local goals that led finally to the larger goal of electing a president who would dismantle the liberal state and democracy.  They are now, unfortunately, on the verge of turning over the government and its policies to millionaires for whom profit is all.  

Despite the state of politics, the art of the possible in the arts appears to have no limits except that of the human body itself.  That is, if the main agency of drama is the actor--as it is in my branch of the arts--a a staged drama would be limited only by the actors' dexterity of movement.  But once you add technology to written drama and the stage, what the actor can portray in that marriage increases exponentially.  It may even enter the realm of what is inconceivable and impossible.

Science fiction and fantasy does this on the page, without the restrictions of staging.  A human meets a friendly extraterrestrial and enters a whole new world of possibility in which the imagination expands in characters and in readers.  In film, we saw this in Mary Poppins and the Jedi in Star Wars.  Technology has a powerful home in film.  And film expands the possibilities of what can be depicted on stage and on the screen.  Interior worlds from Hitchcock’s Spellbound and Vincente Minelli's American In Paris (Gershwin) illustrate.

The art of the possible, then, is limited only by the material it employs.  Putting more than one type of matter in the pot increases possibilities.  On paper, collage and dada show this best. 3-D Constructs can incorporate amazing surprises.  Move an actor or dancer into 3-D space limits possibility until technology and film expand the possibilities again.  Remove the human/animal agent of action, and there are no limits except the imagination.

Given freedom, art—creation—is limited only by the minds and hearts of the artist and creative team.  This is the freedom artists expected when activist communists created the Soviet Socialist Republic, but instead found that art was restricted to that which promoted life under the new administration.  Realism was required, though the realism depicted conditions that were not yet established.  Fantasy.

II.

Let's try dialogue:

It is possible that I won't finish all I want to do in one lifetime. Do I then get another chance?  

Maybe.

What does it depend on?

Losing the "I."  

I will not remember who or what I was, though I might have a feeling that I've been here before?  

Yes, it is a stranger who undertakes the unfinished work, as soon as that person discovers what it is.

And the previous me evaporates into the spaces that matter and spirit go to replenish themselves.  With no sense of continuity?  

Yes.  Just trust the process.  Live fully.  Don't save anything up.  That won't help.

But what if it could help?  What if I left a narrative which the next person could find.  Or left clues.  Like, remember the bag of clues in the movie Paycheck? The protagonist loses his memory, but he leaves clues so he could discover the big task he had to do.  And he does.  And he is able to save the planet!

Is that your unfinished work, to save the planet?

It could be.  Reverse climate change, and evaporate the money of the billionaires so they have to find another way to live.

In your dreams.

Ok, in my dreams.  But dream is the first step to the possibility of becoming real.

I think you should just do what you are called to do in this space and time, and let the future take care of itself.  The past, too.  People should stop meddling with God's plan.

Do you actually believe there is a God who has a plan?

Yes, though it may not be a plan you might choose.

Think, though.  What if the plan included people like me who tried to communicate with those who came after them?  Remember the prophets?

Yes.  But come on now.  Don't make me laugh.  Just work with the people around you with integrity and purpose--and we'll see where it goes.

© 2025 Susan L. Chast

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