Writers circle prompt: May

Mayday—

1)    Said three times, a distress signal.

2)    Pagans raise maypoles and weave their way around them for fertility and spring.

3)    Workers unite, celebration of working people.

4)    And last year, my mother’s death.

I’ll never be able to separate them now

I remember Mom telling me she was a red-diaper baby, carried by her mom and dad in May Day parades.  That marchers were beaten in NYC streets—something she was always worried would happen to me as I protested the war in Vietnam. She told me stories my grandmother never told me of grandpa unionizing a cloth factory and publishing a newspaper in the 1930s.  She said that the move to upstate NY came in the 1940s because of her family’s safety in the MacCarthy era.  How nothing changes--government hearings occur and recur and blur the faces of corporate bosses and law enforcement.  Paperwork haunts the innocent in the end, she said.  So, take no pictures and give no names if we go to NYC or DC in the front lines of anti-war protests: Soldiers are workers, too, coerced to kill workers abroad while the need for war on poverty grows.  Mom didn’t move upstate with her folks, but stayed in the NYC for her work with GE, manufacturing radios.  It was there that she met my father, at union meetings.  They married on the 21^st of February 1947, and moved upstate to live in Mom’s parents’ house where Mom became a housewife and mother. 

May Day was about workers, about uniting them at first and second about celebrating them.  Not work in the home like many women and children did, but workers earning a living through their valuable labor, workers that needed unions to fight for better working conditions.  Women’s issues and conditions in the home were not to be my issues until college when I discovered feminism.    

At this point, I did a google and wiki search for GE manufacturing of radios in the 1940s but couldn’t find any NYC locations.  Mom had told a story about a fire starting in her work station there—a fire quickly put out—because it threatened her notes on Union organizing that she kept on a shelf there.  I found nothing.  My story changed to me learning about work outside the home.

 

I remember myself as a bespectacled 12-year-old Girl Scout learning about work.  I attended a summer girl scout camp in the woods behind Jonas Studios—the location where sculptor and artist Jonas made life-sized moving dinosaurs for the 1964 World’s Fair.  A skinny-legged girl, I crowded around the mold-makers of fiberglass giants, asking questions and lingering to see the sweat behind graceful sculptures in the days when work was plentiful and beauty, too.  

Then, I skipped down the path eagerly to flag raising and our girl scout roster of chores.  Together two of us grabbed the bucket with too-sweet smelling pink goop to swab outhouse seats and come back again with the box of lime, and work done, scrubbed skin off fingers and arms to put on bathing suits and jump into the cool buggy lake happy to earn the reward: hotdogs and corn on the cob and songs, games and crafts: little red glass bead necklaces, yellow macaroni name tags, and pasty fingers.  Over and over, we washed hands as the day ended and skipped up the path, to linger with the dinosaur parts, climb aboard the bus home to meet "What did you do today?" I answered with few displays and many descriptions of outhouse chores and clay molds for moving dinosaurs.

 

© 2025 Susan L. Chast

Writer's Circle Prompts.

Please respect my copyright.

Alexander technique Constructive rest

 

Writers Circle Prompt: How do I experience power and powerlessness?

How do I experience power and powerlessness?  

I.

The first thing that popped into my head is my powerlessness in the face of war with its destruction and annihilation.  Military powers persist at war.  Few have the power to survive it.  

Only chance leaves me out of wars.  I feel powerless to stop them.  I feel powerless even to affect the news blackout that hides the worst of the atrocities.  I fantasize that a crowd of Americans or a mass of Quakers from around the world could stop war if we were willing to become human shields.  I recall the photo of one man stopping a line of tanks in Tiananmen Square—if he stopped them.  I recall the journals of Rachel Corrie, the American women standing on a porch of a Palestinian house.  She was mowed down by a tank.  Would it have made a difference if more people had been willing to defy and die?  It made a difference in Gandhi’s India.  Non-violent people were beaten and shot and killed on the way to gaining home rule.  And they won.  Much fewer people died than would have died in a war.  Those who died in this non-cooperation effort turned powerlessness into power.  The cost was their lives.  Could I do that?

No.  I don't have the courage to defy bombs, tanks, guns, or even the commands of a tyrant.  (Well, I might have the courage to defy the commands of Trump, if he stops tampering with free speech.  Time will tell.)  Right now I experience power only in the manipulation of words, regardless of whether or not I write in an acceptable form, or spend time shaping the artistry of my expression. But often the words sit in my computer rather than go public.

Two people here remind me how to have empowerment in public.  They have stepped into crowds of protestors holding signs and chanting.  Week days, they sit at the spot where the driveway of our retirement community meets a 4-lane avenue.  They hold up signs so the issues stay in the minds of the people driving home from work.  They count the beeps of supporters.  I have joined them twice so far.  The mood is cheerful, though the need for action is serious.  I felt empowered on that corner.  Again, I am merely using words, but using them publicly makes a difference between feeling empowered or powerless.  

II.

Thinking about this led me to reflect on the part of my life I spent as a director of educational theatre (at five collages SUNYA, UC Berkeley, Wells Collage, The Collage of William and Mary, and Bucknell University).  I was rarely the person who performed, but in rehearsal I felt the power to shape scenes and to empower students to find their roles, relationships, and objectives.  I think I revealed their power, a large use of courage in a small environment.  I came home each day satisfied, fulfilled.  The finished art had power, too, in public performance.  But I am very aware, as Plato and Augustus Boal remind us, that no one can think that playing a soldier or king on stage makes them a soldier or king in life.  My backstage empowerment in the role of director does not transfer into performative courage--power--outside the theatre.

Once though, in a production I helped to shape called “It is Better to Speak,” my collective of theatre activists took the drama from the stage to the street to give energy and encouragement to anti-war protestors (at the Women’s Encampment for a Future of Peace and Justice). We built a play with a juxtaposition of scenes of powerlessness with scenes of hope, using material that we gathered from activists across the USA--their poetry, songs, anecdotes, and newspaper articles.  Even those watching, therefore, helped to create the play.   We didn’t tell a story so much as build and then release tension scene by scene about the proliferation of nuclear weapons and how weapons were used in the past.  We sometimes narrated and sometimes danced the material, finding moves to enhance the words we were saying, particularly those from survivors of Hiroshima.  The brilliance of the material was that it travelled reshaped, depending on which performers were available.  In the audiences, we saw tears.  After the performances we were often thanked for the depth of the experience. I would love to participate in street theatre again.

We took the title of the production, "It is better to speak" from Audre Lorde's poem “A Litany for Survival.” Speaking out of her experience as a Black woman and lesbian, she said:

. . . when we speak we are afraid
our words will not be heard
nor welcomed
but when we are silent
we are still afraid
 
So it is better to speak
remembering
we were never meant to survive.

© 2025 Susan L. Chast

Writer's Circle Prompts.

Please respect my copyright.

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

Writer's Circle Prompts.

Please respect my copyright.