Open Up Your Past & Future
In anticipation of tomorrow’s writing workshop—“Write Your Past & Future Open” with author, poet and artist, Patrice Vecchione—I’m happy to share two poems written by Alice Tao, the talented poet whose work I first shared last autumn. Alice, who turns 90 this year, published her first book of poetry, My River gently flows, when she was 88. It was my great pleasure to be in the audience the first time Alice read her poetry in public, and I’m thrilled that she’s agreed to read one of her poem’s during tomorrow’s workshop.
Alice, who was born in China in 1935, began writing poetry twenty-one years ago during a workshop led by Patrice at a local library. Alice says she would never have published her collection without the encouragement and assistance Patrice provided every step of the way.
Baby Alice held by her mother
Patrice was also my very first collaborator when I began writing Quest for Eternal Sunshine—the father-daughter posthumous collaboration that inspired this entire platform. I’m eager to share Patrice’s deep wisdom and vast creativity with you in tomorrow’s workshop. (It’s free, online via Zoom, and will run from 10:00 AM to noon Pacific. Learn more and sign up here).
Patrice’s goal for tomorrow’s workshop is to have people discover how writing can help them see and understand their lives anew. “When we remember our pasts, we tend to replay old stories in the same old ways—familiar events recalled in familiar ways. I think of that as story rut,” she explains. “But what if the way we have remembered our pasts has limited us, kept us from seeing from other angles or looking just around the corner? And when it comes to envisioning the future, could some of the stories we’ve told ourselves be holding us back?”
Bicycle Girl, cut and torn paper collage, by Patrice Vecchione
In our workshop, we’ll open up our old stories so that we can view, remember, and re-experience them from our current perspective—with all of our other life experiences, knowledge, and greater understanding of the world, rather than who we were in the past. Patrice says, “The imagination is a vast, intelligent, curious, knowing part of who we are. We’ll invite it in to consider and reconsider, to inform and illuminate.”
Patrice explains that the following poem by Alice, "Child Bride," was written from the perspective of her younger self while incorporating insights from her present viewpoint as an elder. In just a few words, Alice conjures the place and time that shaped her. Through her poem, we enter the realm of her childhood—a world so different from what most of us know.
Patrice says, “‘My Mother Never Left Me’ is a beautiful illustration of how our past is always inextricably woven into the present. It gives us both the sense of how Alice saw the experience when she was a child and how she sees it now. Sometimes, the only way we can truly know something is to live it and then look back. I hope you will join us tomorrow to explore your past and future through the magical vehicle of writing from the heart."
Read Alice’s poem from previous blogs here. Her book, “My River gently flows,” is available from River House Books in Carmel, California.
