Heart to Page Story Slam

A great way to spend two hours

The writers of Heart to Page took part in a Story Slam at the end of their coursework. Each writer shared 10-15 minutes of writing from their portfolio or manuscripts that they’ve been working on over the course of nine months. Following is how I introduced each writer.

Heart to Page is a writing course, but I think it might be better suited as a mystery course. That’s because while those who show up all know they will write (and write, and write, and write some more), nobody really knows what exactly they will end up with. The 2024-2025 Heart to Page writers have all started with a hunch, a spark, a nudge - something none of them could shake loose - and for nine months they followed that still small thing. They listened to and looked closely at it. They shaped and were shaped by it.

I suspect none of these writers will say there is no longer any confusion, or that all that is within them is now shaped and sorted. That wasn’t my hope for them anyway. My hope was that each of these writers has the poetry and tools of endurance when it comes to turning what is unsaid into stories.

Kim

If you are ever unsure about what to do with your life, ever so overwhelmed by the troubles of the world, so completely in awe anew from the morning news, read Kim’s writing. “Find a path,” she’ll tell you.

Find a path
either in the woods
or the park down the street
perhaps the main street of your town
or the bustling city
don't move right away
feel your feet
press into the ground
attune yourself
to the pulse of the earth
just listen.

Kim’s writing is a witness to the world through movement and observation. It’s not so much where you are or where you are going. What do you see and hear? How are you using your hands, your feet - who you are - in this confusing and heartbreaking world? Every and any path you are on is a chance to pay and bear witness to your neighbor. And you is your neighbor? Kim writes:

“the person next door and across the street. Walkers and their dogs in the early morning light. The cashier with her smile and “How are you?” The librarian who shows you their favorite book that soon becomes your favorite book. The one who gets your mail and waters the plants when you’re gone. The ones who leave hot coffee and produce at your door. The mamas who wrangle toddlers and push babies in strollers asking one another, “Is it supposed to be this hard?” The dads who build forts and play games. The families walking to church and the people who will never enter into the sanctuary. The one on the street corner asking if you can spare some change. The friend who lies with you in bed when you can’t get up. The one who makes calls to a therapist and crisis line and makes a plan for your safety. The woman who buys lemonade and homemade juice from your kids. The ones who bring dinner. The ones who take your kids for an afternoon. The ones who sit and fold laundry with you. All these and more, revealing the face of God.”

Kim’s writing shows us we all carry similar questions and doubts, joys and heartaches. It is walking together and sharing what it is we see that we learn all that we can share.

//

There’s Rebecca’s poetry:

huhng-ger]
noun:
a compelling need or desire for food
a strong or compelling desire or craving

As in
running
the dreaded one-mile test
in fourth grade,
vowing to finish,
as my breath quickens
and my legs weaken,
with still
so far
to go.

As in
standing naked,
trembling on the scale, convinced
it’s broken
as the numbers flicker by.

As in
circling
the store floor in a dress, tags
still attached,
paid to be
a living mannequin —
yet lifeless and numb —
modeling how it drapes
beautifully
on my hungry body.

As in
silently screaming as I
stand in the pantry,
staring at the shelves,
stomach hollow and thrashing.

As in
seeking
help beyond the doors of the
treatment center —
an old house, now
a new home —
to try
to love
the body I no longer knew.

There is her prose:

I stand at the corner of Third and 62^nd Street, scanning for a break in traffic so I can run across.

I think about tomorrow, whether the producer will bite at my segment pitch, what my boss will say if she doesn’t.

A deep, grated voice breaks through the taxi horns. “And I think to myself, what a wonderful world.”

My eyes land on an older man, hunched over a grocery cart brimming with cans. He smiles as he bellows the verses.

I take in his tattered clothes and missing teeth, and my eyes fill. What a wonderful world indeed.

There’s Rebecca’s fiction:

“This isn’t how I’m supposed to find out I’m pregnant,” Lauren’s voice broke as a sob escaped her. “This isn’t how I’m supposed to feel.”

“Oh, sweetie,” Shay sighed into the phone. “I wish I could give you a big hug.”

Lauren’s shoulders heaved as she let the tears flow. She missed Shay, New York, her old carefree life. This new life was the complete opposite: quiet, dull, lonely. A child on the way made it feel even heavier. For a second, she wished it was all a dream, and she’d wake up back in her and Shay’s old apartment, surrounded by exposed brick and blaring horns from the street below.

“What do I do?” Lauren thought to herself, then realized she’d said it aloud.

There are her master craft lessons from her reading journal:

The unknown for these students layered on top of the unknown for the reader creates a heaviness and underlying dread in the reader. We know that if secrets are being kept, what will unfold is likely not good. Ishiguro could have chosen to divulge it all for the reader early on, but instead creates a powerful slow burn that brings us on a journey with the students.

Or

Piazza has the uncanny ability to powerfully and succinctly articulate harsh truths. This is something I struggle with in my writing. I tend to circle the truth, swirling around it but unable to identify the right words that “land” it.

I looked forward to reading Rebecca’s writing like I used to look forward to the monthly glossy magazines that would come in the mail. I knew I would be entertained, challenged, I knew I would learn something, and I knew I would be more willing to take a look at my own writing after reading hers.

//

It will not surprise me one bit if I am teaching from the established literary expert Crystal Rowe’s text: The Care and Keeping of Stories, What To Read When You’re Learning To Write, or some such title that teaches would-be writers the importance not only of reading, but reading well. Every time I read an annotation of Crystal’s, I learn something.

From John Steinbeck’s The Moon Is Down, she takes note of a particular sentence: He switched it off again and said, “A light in the daytime is a lonely thing.”

“I have never thought of this before,” Crystal writer, “but it’s true. When you turn a light on during the day, it doesn’t have the same effect as it does at nighttime. Even on the darkest, greyest days, there’s enough daylight outside to overshadow the light from a lamp. It’s not until it’s very dark that the smallest light makes a difference. That feels important to me - especially right now. The darker it is, the smaller the light can be to make a very big difference.”

She pays attention to Samantha Harvery’s description in her book, Orbital: “I simply adore her use of the adjectives sun-blanched and threadbare. These are not words that I typically associate with floors, but it really gives us a good picture of the house. Her use of nouns is also quite powerful: butterfly on the tap, dragonfly on the futon, spider inside a slipper; pumpkins, humidity, heat, snow - This passage makes me want to rewrite everything I’ve ever written about the houses we’ve lived in or even those we’ve visited. It makes me want to go on a home tour and pay particular attention to floors, back yards, and the wear and tear of a house that has become a home.”

I think my favorite are the observations she makes about Dracula: “Up to this point, the narrator is talking of all the bad scary things the locals are telling him about the castle, but here he notices the loveliness of the scenery as they drive along and it pulls him out of his fear. It’s only momentary though, as he pulls us out of the bliss with a note that the driver seems particularly hasty – which leads us to wonder again about the bad things about to happen.

A page later, he gives us another lovely bit of description:

There were many things new to me: for instance, hay ricks in the trees, and here and there very beautiful masses of weeping birch, their white stems shining like silver through the delicate green of the leaves.

It’s almost as if he’s trying to convince himself it won’t be as bad as the rumors make it sound.

Later, from a different character:

This is a lovely place. The little river, the Esk, runs through a deep valley, which broadens out as it comes near the harbour. A great viaduct runs across, with high piers, through which the view seems somehow further away than it really is. The valley is beautifully green, and it is so steep that when you are on the high land on either side you look right across it, unless you are near enough to see down. …

I shall come and sit here very often myself and work.

For two pages she describes this place where she will be saying. She paints a picture of serenity and peace. It’s a place she wants to spend a lot of time, and as a reader, so do I. This becomes the setting where devastating things happen, which makes me think about how no place is fully without sorrow and terror - no matter how beautiful it is or how much we love it.”

Crystal’s observations on beauty and terror are what I think are at the heart of everything she writes about. Whether she’s turning over memories in Georgia, or finding new ones in Massachusetts, Crystal grappled with and puts to story that ever present tension of beauty and joy, sorrow and terror. Reading her work shows us how to grapple with the world we are in, in all its paradoxical glory.

//

“With warm, cantaloupe-colored walls and shiny, stainless steel appliances, the kitchen presented as polished.” So begins one of Erin’s many explorations of the life of a woman both on the cusp of change and completely at home with who she is.

It is this dichotomy that charges through Erin’s poetry and prose. How do we anticipate our changing and be in love with who we are in the same moment? Erin answers. She tells of three geese waddling on a where cars with drivers that have very important places to be freeze and wait:

watch [we] black-billed birds dawdle

and waddle until they've crossed over

and danger passes

and we are all free

to be wild.

Erin shares the way something (or someone) wants to be presented and she does it with grace and beauty, but she also gently holds onto the shoulders of what’s polished and says, “Listen, now. You’re beautiful. But I’m going to expose your allure and it won’t be polished. It’ll be gritty and wild and it will be true. Hold tight, beautiful one. You are on the cusp.”

Interested in taking a nine-month deep dive into reading and writing? My 2025-2026 Heart to Page writing cohort is filling up, but there are spots left. Details here. Apply here.