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.

Songs and poems, mostly brand new, all original. Check out my YouTube channel where I sing the songs.

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.

Listen to this book of new poetry, by Maggie Hess.

This book you will find split like a seed, half walnut, half pecan. Some girl might have found two husked nut bodies only to grip them tight in her fist and crack them together. Maybe you that girl, hungry for the meat of the land. Or just curious about the wonder of nature.

New poetry by Maggie Hess covering the range of human emotion (but not forgetting to boogie).

A mixed genre book of poetry, memoir, fiction, and haiku, Kintsugi 金継ぎ Walnut: 22 Years of Writing tells the story of the young adulthood of Maggie Hess. The book opens with a series of diary entries from 2001, when Maggie was traveling abroad in Costa Rica with her scientist sister, exploring the rainforest daily, and becoming a Quaker.

This is an extensive diary of my time in Costa Rica from January to May 2001, sandwiched between two more recent reflective entries. I recommend listening to this if you are interested in exploring Costa Rica, in what Monteverde, Costa Rica, was like in this particular time period before much of the modern development, or if you are interested in hearing a firsthand account of a young woman with bipolar disorder in between severe swings and culture shock.

Journey (Almost) to the Waterfall is the latest collection of poems, plus two short nonfiction essays by Maggie Hess. It involves nature, treacherous hikes, thyme filled meadows, and a deep gratitude for human community. These happen to be some of Hess's best works.

In 2009 I lived in Highlands, North Carolina, before I became resolute to graduate or ever even started at Berea College. My internship with three other women, under the stewardship of a Unitarian nonprofit retreat center, was a time of questioning and growing more than any other time of my life. It also encouraged a raw, unique style of writing, influenced by the old-growth dwarf oak forest surrounding us and a certain Meditation Rock where we loved to sit and overlook the rolling mountain.

Lone Bird is 19 poems by Maggie Hess. This stark chapbook exposes brutal honesty in nature symbolism. Listen deeply to its poems. Bite right into the meat of it. Don't be ashamed.

Thirty-six poems inspired by volunteering full time with a disability nonprofit, discovery around disability and employment, weight loss and growth, and silence and nature.

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.

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 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.

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