I miss home, and I miss happy, familiar faces. I miss the people I just met and have always known. There are many places on Earth where you will feel like you have been before. In the physical world, we are quite limited. But when you combine that pinch of knowledge with the other lesser-known, understood concepts and dimensions, some spaces become heavenly in their experience as a home for a nomad.

My father used to tell me about the ancient Greek polymath Archimedes and how he shouted Eureka the moment he sat in a bathtub and discovered buoyancy, one of my favorite concepts as a child. Almost magic until my father showed me how science could ‘solve’ this magic. On that day, my father was happy to teach me something I did not know, and I was happy that I still believed in magic because science and the idea that man can bunk and debunk a fact or an issue are magic.

It doesn’t matter to me that years later, when I started law school, a place I thought was to discern truths and lies, I realized that it was all an urban myth—the shouting of Eureka by Archimedes. In law school, you see, every segmented truth was dissected until it was found in hubris. Then it was slated to be gauged and probed. Slated to be lived, breathed, and bathed in.

My workshop on writing prose poems from nature prompts, called Nature without Boundaries, was a life-changing day for all the writers involved. The majority were over the age of 40, and the humility and kindness with which we learned about each other was the kind of magic I believed existed as a child and that magic was mine to wield. Collaboration became sustained and sufficed. The beauty of the workshop was also in me learning the ropes of facilitating and teaching your own teachers at times!

This experience has not been easy and has been one of sweat and many dreams.

What are prose poetry workshops, and why do we need them?

I have always been fascinated with working prose poems, and what works with impromptu nature prompts?

When I started studying poems, and later, my published prose poetry book, I received quite a reception with regards to the storied format of poetic stimulation found in the culminations. The way we poets delve into writing prose and vis versa is magic innit?

We started with our introductions and ended with poems and prose that none of us knew we had it in us! Utilizing repetition and invoking memories from nature to reveal and distort, all of us helped each other be informed of a collective desire to create impact through words on the blank pages. I loved the six hours of togetherness where we sat, we wrote, we ate, and we walked the trails as if we had done this a hundred times before. The magic is in the pudding at the reading at brews!

Eureka Springs has an abundance of trails to traverse and find inspiration in.

Writing prose poems and reading your work in progress on nature trails was heartening. The nature prompts that inspired haikus, taigas, and cohesive poems of wonder, inspiration, and visions seen in flora & fauna around us was reverberated later in a reading at Brews, the local hot spot.

When we walked the trail, I gave everyone a piece of blank paper that was filled to the brim where we saw how bugs leave their shells, the naked lady in full bloom, moss that grew wild and the messages heard in Grottos and springs!

Nature is full of prompts and the nature trail walk was one of the best walks a bunch of poets could take together! We all helped each other come to varied realizations, and what healed us most was the space provided by Eureka Springs as the immersive.

Invitations were sent, oracles established

The sheer joy of walking on the trails, where I had found much joy and inspiration, but also a lot of the prompts that I had prepared for the class and the re-invention of the ideas in one big pot, was humbling. I want to do this again, and I promised Eureka Springs. I had found it. I have, indeed.

I hope you enjoy the gallery of memories that I have posted here and also share my snips and quips~

Wrote this letter listening to Sanson Ki Mala (Violin Cover)

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Shalini Singh