Showing results by author "Maggie Hess" in All Categories

These 100 prompts for contemplative writing and poetry have been tested by a writing support group. Some of them are single words, others are questions or phrases. These prompts should be great aids to your personal growth, writing, and poetry.

So I’m stepping back from the girl who thinks of myself as meek and incapable or crazy and a quitter. I need to remember all of the power it took to start all of the things I have started. I need to remember the person who finds herself lost in the woods and finds her legs under her and walks barefoot for her own survival.

A collection of new poems by Maggie Hess. 

The idea that language should be paired down is no joke when it comes to poetry. Syllable count varies from poet to poet and some haikus just occupy a single line, defying the convention of three. Listen to this very personal collection of haiku.

With both clean essays and jagged diary entries, this memoir tells the story of one person's progress through disability and volunteering, self-exploration, and discovery, and snippets of growth in the contemplative writing process itself. Ultimately, the question "Can I work?" is answered with the passage of time. A challenging but uplifting piece of writing, spanning over a half a year of lyric prose with a touch of poetry. 

Poet, mentor, and Berea College professor, Libby Jones once told me that everything I write is an ode. The collection of odes that makes up this chapbook has a variety of themes with a common element: mysticism. According to the Friends of Abrams Creek website, the Cherokees believed that the soul entered the afterlife by passing through the waterfall. My intent in this themed chapbook is to bring my listeners closer to the mystery the poet knows. 

These 20 haikus are similar to Maggie Hess' popular other book of haiku, Breath of a Heron. The three self-portraits are studied within the haiku writing, too, as well as being evocative stand-alone artwork. Maggie Hess is known for writing simple, traditional-seeming, whimsical, nature-oriented haikus, keeping her language sparse within the confines of the poems, which adds something special.

These poems on resilience offer a durable hope for hard times. They were all written in June and July of 2020. Ranging from an ode to hackneyed poems about the moon to free verse about schizophrenic walls, these poems should at least give you something new to think about and read to get your mind off of the current pandemic. May the perspective offered in these writings help ease your suffering.

Some Contemplative Writing students have spoken about the contemplative writing process as a "river of words" or a freeing of the writing processes. Contemplation is the mental easing of something that often results in the release of more inner workings than initially expected. I find when writing becomes less of a course of nature for me, painting and letting out imagery and color can itself ease up the processes of writing. These past few years I have been deeply studying and practicing meditation, which shares something with contemplation. 

A chronology of some of Maggie Hess' most important poems over the period of over a decade. See how Hess progresses in her writing over the years. 

This work of lyric prose is Maggie Hess' retelling of the great Japanese poem "Hojoki", only about Hess's life, instead of the Kyoto poet, Chomei. Chomei returns to river scenery where Hess draws on descriptions of birds.

These are 26 new poems by Maggie Hess muse over mud puddles, rhyme in poetry, and eyebrows.

Sixty descriptions of books I have read in the past few years on the subject of compassion, poetry, and peace.

This is a very short children's story told in poem form about a gardener who gets out of an emotional slump by digging. Sound interesting? The author thinks so too. Listen to Going Down and In to Get Up and Out. 

This is a short book of mostly short poems, all of them about Tobin the dog. He was the best yellow lab friend many of us ever had. This homage to Tobin will make you laugh and cry! 

The story of a bean and a firefly who fell down a very deep well and how they survived to tell the tale.

A summery short story about hitchhiking, surfing, and living the alternative lifestyle.

Swimming one mile takes me about an hour, and for a long time, I gaged my experience by how many laps I had swum. Once I got to 36, the mile mark, I would quit swimming. I talked to a lifeguard who is a veteran of the Iraq war and was touched by his humility. He said if I want motivational advice not to talk with him. But he told me his routine involves swimming at whatever pace he feels like for about an hour. I began wondering if I could do that, to swim like I did when I was a child, just for swimming's sake. Just because it feels so wonderful.  

Some people write college essays just to turn in the required assignment, but rare students - through their passion - turn into the assignments as works of art. Five of these were actual assignments for classes in autobiography, bloomsbury, religion, peace studies, one was written just for fun during college years, and the final essay was my actual admissions essay. 

This is a short story of a young woman driving south in the time of the Korean War. Loosely told, it is fiction based on the history of Monteverde, Costa Rica.