Here in Philadelphia

March has most definitely come in like a lion, and I'm staring out at what I hope will be the "last blast" snow storm of this season before spring arrives. Spring arrives to the city regardless of the weather in the form of the annual Philadelphia Flower Show at our convention center. I'm hoping to get over there later in the week and share the scents, sounds and sights. In the meantime, this past week has been rife with thoughts and memories of reading, first stirred up by the novelist/ journalist Anna Quindlen. She spoke last Monday.

Quindlen covered a lot of ground in her talk to a packed audience of several hundred in downtown Philadelphia, but she the place she started, and what she circled back to over and over, was her childhood love of books. When she mentioned that she was the kid whose mother had to shoo her outside to play or she'd spend even sunny days in a particular chair inside the pages of a favorite novel, I was reminded of the summer I spent reading and then rereading Little Women to the point that I could get myself crying over Beth's death about a chapter and a half ahead of her actual demise. If you're a writer, you probably have at least one tale of your own like that, a chair or a corner or a blanket on a beach that was your reading place.
What Quindlen said that really struck me, though, was that she believes her childhood reading taught her compassion for others, real empathy.

After a really crazed week of teaching, I ended the week as the same note was sounded in a different setting. A nonprofit in New Jersey concerned with preservation of waterways at wetlands, operating on the premise that the best way to sensitize the public to their mission is to say it with art, sponsored a photography exhibit and poetry reading Friday night. Check out the photographs if you get a chance (they make great writing prompts!) at http://www.drgreenway.org./ Twenty-five poems referred to waterways as places of refuge, of joy, of consolation, detailed plant, bird and animal life, brought back memories for all attending. The scientists present credited the artists with being true advocates. It was a new definition of a political poem to me; my poem's about gather crabs and starfish with my little sister and not caring that we had food stuck in our teeth.

As if to cap off a theme, I saw the movie The Reader last night-- great performance by Kate W for sure. I was less enamored of what the movie did with the book in some ways, but the notion, again, that being a reader means you enter a broader world than you have around you and therefore you can develop compassion-- well, there it was again. So I've been hit over the head all week with the importance and pleasure of both reading and writing. This week I'm carving out time to do both!

Liz