Join us online for a Zoom on Writing with Frida Kahlo!

Wednesday April 9, 2025.
4 pm to 6 pm Eastern Standard Time.


Frida Kahlo is one of the most widely beloved artists and personalities of all time. We admire her fierce independence and determination to live life on her terms, her passionate heart, and her remarkable accomplishments despite a lifetime of illness and pain stemming from childhood disease and a terrible trolley accident as a teenager. Frida's devotion to Mexico and to her husband Diego also fuelled her unique and personal art.

We will do a whirlwind tour through Frida's story and a deep dive into her work. We will do a few creative writing exercises using her story and paintings as prompts.

Our workshops are about community, conversation, connection, and creativity. All are welcome. You are welcome to write poetry, fiction, CNF, or just observe.

Transition

What world is this she gazes on, unsure?
She’s what she is, but is she also more?
Or is she something other, some new she
yet unimagined, yet about to be?
​

Divided
  
What is she thinking as she combs
her long fine hair? What does she wish?
Poor creature, from such different homes!
Half lovely girl, half lissome fish.

​Bruce Bennett

Bruce Bennett is author of ten books of poetry and more than thirty chapbooks.  His most recent chapbook is Images Into Words (The Dove Block Project, 2022), a collection of ekphrastic poems co-authored with poet Jim Crenner. Bennett was a founder and editor of the journals Field and Ploughshares, and from 1973-2014 taught Literature and Creative Writing and directed the Visiting Writers Series at Wells College. In 2012 he was awarded a Pushcart Prize. He lives in Aurora, New York. His poetry website is https://justanotherdayinjustourtown.com.

Two Deer, Sunset

Two deer, sunset 
except it’s fire 
wild in the western sky 
trees and homes succumb 

Two deer, motionless 
the fear as astringent in the nostrils 
as the smoke 
what to do, what to do 

Two deer, turn, run 
flying embers at their heels 
the cement of Los Angeles 
becomes their refuge 

Two deer, at rest 
beside the fountain 
at Gloria Molina Grand Park 
droplets brush clear the ashes 
from their russet pelts 

Two deer, sunset 

Michele Rule

Michele Rule (she/her) is a disabled writer from Kelowna BC, with a special interested in the topic of chronic illness. She is published in Five Minute Lit, Poetry Pause and the anthology Chicken Soup for the Soul, among others. Michele won first prize in the Wine Country Writers Festival 2024 Poetry Contest. She is an associate member of the League of Canadian Poets and co-edits the Solitary Daisy Haiku journal. Michele lives in a beautiful garden surrounded by people who love her just the way she is. You can read some of Michele’s work at https://MicheleRule.ca.

The Waiting

my clock
the tides
their  ebb
                & flow
ocean’s contractions
salt air             
so dense, i’m rawed.
 
no spark remains
but neither stillness
     not yet 
perhaps never.
muscle memory lingers . . . .
my heart anticipates
its echo
still.

Nina Burokas

Nina Burokas’ interest is the connection between art, culture and life: people and place in conversation across time. Her poetry appears in Port Angeles Fine Arts Center’s Sculpture Park, the anthologies This Machine is Made for Earth, Inspired by Art, Teacakes & Tarot (publication pending) and Winter in America (Again, in her chapbook, Wintering and online at Unleash Lit and Silver Birch Press. She frequently reviews books for Raven Chronicles. An adjunct business instructor at Mendocino College in California, Nina has been a contributing author/editor for five digital business titles.

​Prelude #18: In Heaven Everything Is Much More Beautiful Than Here on Earth
 
Eight mothers in white climb the vertical line at the painting’s blue
center, shark teeth in a salty sea, the expanse between the mother 
in bed and the daughter she abandons so she might become 
 
an angel. Why does she lean out the window, her ribs like jambs, 
her eyes like glass, her limbs no longer warm? Charlotte’s mother 
said, when your Mummy has turned into a little angel, she’ll come down 
 
and bring a letter. My mother too sang me a lullaby: on the window’s edge 
stood a beautiful bird; a girl rushed to the window, the bird flew away. 
When I bled, she stretched a bandaid over the wound, 
 
when she pinched, my skin turned black and blue. She told me 
angels have only one task to fulfill, unlike a mother 
or like God. Like Charlotte, to survive, I gazed out the window
 
and dipped my pen-tip into my own blood, 
making shapes from its golden-hued blues.

​Alexander Nagler 
Charlotte Salomon's husband, Nice, 1943

She sang to herself while working.
Her face always in profile, 
perched atop a drooping 
sunflower floating in the blue 
air, a green circle, a chair, a pear, 
a pair of untied shoes, an indigo 
vase drizzling petals, paintings 
of paintings, an orange wheel-
barrow, a child in a long white 
shirt holding an enormous red ball. 
 
I was her husband but she saw
only colours, paint, and this. 
I cooked her vegetable soup, 
cleaned her brushes, stood them tips-
up like unopened tulips, led her 
to the buttercup-strewn meadow, 
sat silently beside her until she could 
see, amongst the clouds, the words
of the prophecy she would make 
come true, one must first go into 
oneself to be able to go out of oneself.

​Dr. Ludwig Grunwald 
Charlotte Salomon's Maternal Grandfather, Nice, 1943
 
She looked just like my younger daughter, whose name
was also Charlotte, who looked just like my older daughter 
Charlotte’s mother, who looked just like my wife – 
how the hell do you expect me to tell 
the difference between all these women? Charlotte 
herself wrote, I became my mother, my grandmother, 
in fact, I was all the characters…I learned to travel their paths 
and become all of them, and I was the same. All women
for me are One Woman: O Persephone, O Demeter, 
O daughter, mother, under-world, over-world, O world, 
All One! All One with me in bed, in the kitchen, then
in the breeze from beyond the open window. 
 
There will always be another, and I’ll call her by the same name.

I Imagine Charlotte Salomon On Vacation, Before the War

In the Museo Palazzo Corboli in Asciano, Italy, gazing  at Lorenzetti’s Triptych of St. Michael the Archangel. Her eyes piercing the painting and St. Michael the Archangel speaking in her mother’s voice, saying:  
 
           If Eve succumbed to the slithering 
           suggestions of just the one-headed serpent, 
 
           how am I to resist this hissing, hepta-
           headed, polka-dotted beast? Its bloated 
 
           belly the very writhing ground beneath 
           my booted feet. In my left hand, a lance: 
 
           it can’t prick the snake’s persuasive song. 
           In my right, a scythe, all might. It can’t stop 
 
           the sound, the seductive sound 
           slinking through my outer blood-
 
           rush cape, my inner pink-blush 
           cloak, my entire mind full of – 
           you will not surely die – my wings, 
           all golden shimmer, decorative – 
 
          my eyes – locked with this long-tongued- 
          one seducing me, your eyes will open, you will 
 
          be like God, this lullaby sung since my blue 
          birth. It’s clear who’s winning here. 
 
I imagine Charlotte responding, shouting: 
 
          Where would I fly off to anyway, and who would I be 
          if not embattled with this creature encircling me?
 
Maya Bernstein 
 
Maya Bernstein is a poet, musician, and facilitator who explores intersections: between the sacred and the everyday, tradition and innovation, freedom and restriction.
 

​Edward Hopper, Cape Cod Evening (1939, oil on canvas, 30 x 40 in.)
 
We build up our muscles 
for waiting. And what it is
 
that time adds up to still
hasn’t showed. I’ll be
 
the silence that hides
inside the storm. You be
 
the connective tissue
that tenses its sinew into
 
twilight’s superlative
giving-way.

​Edward Hopper, Summer Evening (1947, oil on canvas, 30 x 42 in.)
 
The breath comes 
at its intervals, like distances. 
 
An ingratiating posture
towards others has been,
 
and continues to be, a front.
Not falsehood, but like weather
 
changes from dusk 
to dusk, an appetite for blinding 
 
the horizon, which means
just another kind of horizon. 

​Edward Hopper, Shakespeare at Dusk (1935, oil on canvas, 17 x 25 in.)
 
Define horizon. An anecdote. 
Exoskeleton. Bestiary of lost idols. 
 
Excuse for an absence. The hive
hunting its bees. Outer limit
 
of an echo, where the story
ratchets back more unsure 
 
than when it left. Still pond
waiting for a pebble. Answer
 
in search of a question to make
it whole, to make it home. 

​Edward Hopper, Excursion into Philosophy (1959, oil on canvas, 30 x 40 in.)
 
Last time I wrote down the date I was saving
something from extinction, from instinct.
 
And as day throws itself again into its own
fire there on the hill, trying to stay warm and
 
losing badly, I decide to stop trying for preservation.
I forget the plot leads, inexorably, here to a man 
 
by a window trying to own a sliver of a world
that stays unowned, unbridled horse headed
 
for the hills and the thick grass there
leaning east against the turning earth. 

​Edward Hopper, Old Ice Pond at Nyack (1897, oil on canvas, 11 3/4 x 19 3/4 in.)
 
Strictly speaking it is winter
inside the mind, where all things 
 
beg for more. The ground 
is choiceless. Wherever 
 
a voice stuns into speech 
there’s singing under the eaves. 
 
Icicles tremble with
an inkling, like the teeth 
 
of some dog that can’t stop 
dreaming of the chase. 
 
Marko Capoferri 
 
Marko Capoferri is a poet, musician, occasional journalist, and former conservation worker. He has lived and worked in eight US states, including Montana, where he has lived since 2015. He received an MFA from the University of Montana. His poems have recently appeared in Sequestrum, The Shore, and Stoneboat Literary Journal. On a good weekend, you will find him in a Western Montana bar playing rock and roll 'til the wee hours of the morning. 

​Lebens ohne Eigenschaften *
 
Joan Miró’s existence was so lacking
in adventure, so utterly devoid
of interest, that it is almost as though
he had deliberately planned to make
 life difficult for his biographer.
Jacques Dupin, Miró
 
It’s all composed of surfaces, I’m afraid, looking back on things. Endless plains, prairies, featureless savannah, veldt and steppe, one after another. But curiously discontinuous, decoupled, when considered from where I sit: discrete, disjunct, defying assembly into what you’d call a life. More like lives, really, the years, without clear succession, and seemingly without number. These lives we lead, nothing like the substance of what you’d call a life. Searching in the mind’s eye for the illuminating detail, we encounter only shards, scatterings, fragments, fugitive aromas, fugitive voices, the flatness of the road beneath a cautious step, the hummocked soil, the endless clumpgrass, a pale horizon impossibly distant. And always the absoluteness of abrupt discontinuity, of change without transition. Never the prospect of an isthmus or embracing panorama. Never the linkage of connective tissue. As though each imagined past were the womb of countless others, like stories told by someone else, about someone else, nested like galaxies, like unstable elements containing more than they are able. One after another, did I say? Maybe every one within some other without end, into the many that is any one, into the infinite, abyssal journey that is recollection. You need to tell the story of this life, I often hear, You’ve seen and done so much. But to undertake that task, to organize the fragments as a sequence, into the master syntax of a single lifetime, as if time’s detritus described a causal or purposeful journey down highways or through scenic terrain, is to tell a tale of pure imagining, to muster all the dislocations of experience into the fanciful passion play of narrative. And yet. And yet is it likely that the past, that which we call our past, can ever remain entirely silent? Can the fragmentary, the involuntary, the disorientations of living, the featureless domains of the inactual, ever remain securely buried in the unrecollected, ever fail to erupt into the precincts of present thought, the self-assertions of our confident speech? So it’s our story, I maintain, that speaks, not the speaker. The story spins a tale that won’t be quelled despite the best efforts of the story-teller to reveal or withhold. A tale of the involuntary, spoken involuntarily, speaks always in the here and now, extends before us here in plain sight, haplessly exposed to the elements and scudding clouds, endlessly offered up in these ineloquent fragments, in the halting cadences of someone’s stumbling speech, always interrupting, endlessly repeating, forever erupting from this impersonal, undifferentiated terrain into the endless landforms of these inscrutable canvases, a succession of flattened images lingering relentlessly in the enigmatic intonations, the unfathomable flatness of poems.

DB Jonas

*Life without Qualities
 
DB Jonas is the author of two collections of poetry, Tarantula Season and Other Poems (2023) and Flight Risk, Poems and Translations (2025). Further examples of his work can be accessed through jonaspoetry.com
 

​Cycladic Female Figure at the Getty Villa

And even with the fires raging
I still hold myself close
Here in this dark room
I am mystery
Tattooed goddess
Ornament
Burial prize
Stolen from a grave 
Laid with my master
Made him my slave
The child in my belly
Never born, always just
Beneath these arms
Round like my breasts
My smooth face painted
Origins in azurite and cinnabar 
This wind reminds me of home
Isle where I was laid to rest
The pieces of me kept whole
For centuries I have wished
To be shattered on the pyramid at Keros
One shoulder here one leg there
Oh, the ruin of that place
No strangers leering through glass
They wonder at my former use
I was what I am: Reminder

Elizabeth Spenst

Elizabeth Spenst is a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet and critic with work appearing in Rattle, On the Seawall, the Tuskegee Review, Paste Magazine, ARTS.BLACK, and forthcoming in the Inquisitive Eater. She's received institutional support for her research and writing from Yale University, the New School, Cave Canem, and Brooklyn Poets. You can find her work at elizabethspenst.com. ​