Poem of the Week, by Sean Thomas Dougherty
Mr. Kraft and his family lived in the town of 300 I grew up five miles north of. One day when I was about nine, he and my mother stood talking in his driveway. He nodded to me at one point and said quietly to my mother, “She’s got it.”
She, meaning me. Got it, as in. . . I don’t know what. But those three words have seen me through every rough patch of my entire life. Every awful conversation, every time someone has tried to tear me down, and also in those dark and frequent moments when I think, You’re a failure, Alison.
I remember how still I stood in Mr. Kraft’s driveway that day, how something lifted from my shoulders, how the world suddenly seemed bigger and kinder. I thought of him again when I read this poem. Wherever you are now, Mr. Kraft, in whatever far-off universe, know how you softened the world for a small girl that day, and how she never forgot your words.
Why Bother, by Sean Thomas Dougherty
Because right now there is someone
out there with
a wound in the exact shape
of your words.
For more information about Sean Thomas Dougherty, please check out his website.
My daughter at eight: What would happen if you die? I tell her she would be very sad but everyone would take such good care of her, and she says No, they wouldn’t. Because I would be dead too, of sadness. My son at four shuffles out of the bedroom in his first pair of flip-flops, having put them on himself with the strap between his second and third toes. It’s fine, mama, don’t worry, they don’t hurt, I can walk. My grandmother, flustered and red-faced in the small kitchen where she’s trying to make dinner for me: Oh Alison, I’m just no use at all anymore. Me outwardly protesting but inwardly stricken by the knowledge that in that single instant, everything is now changed. 
I’m teaching a Creative Writing Boot Camp this week. Six days in a row, seven hours a day, nineteen of us gather in a windowed classroom halfway between Minneapolis and St. Paul to write and write and talk and talk about the art and craft and act of writing. Poems and tiny short stories, tiny memoirs. Beautiful, painful, funny, wistful fragments of life, captured on paper and released into the invisible air of the room. I could teach for another fifty years and never lose this astonishment, that nurses and truck drivers and musicians and stay at home parents and hair stylists and sex workers and clerks and commodities traders and group home workers, Muslim and Christian and atheist, come together in a single small room and transform themselves and me and the whole outside world by the power of sharing stories. If a teacher asked me to name a sacred place, the classroom would be mine.
Alison McGhee 