Bronx Historical Society Presents the Kindness Session, a Poetry Writing Workshop

Bronx Historical Society is presenting "The Kindness Session," a poetry workshop on recognizing the difference between kindness and cruelty to channel that in our writing on November 18 at 6 PM till approximately 7:45. The Poetry Workshop takes place at the Poe Visitors Center, 2640 Grand Concourse, in the Bronx. Subways near the Visitors Center are the 4, B, and D train at the Kingsbridge stop.  Buses to the Center are Bx9, Bx22, Bx28, Bx38, and BxM4 (Express bus). The Poe Visitors Center is up the Hill from the Fordham Metro North train stop.

Led by area poets Elisabeth von Uhl and Anne Leighton, the Kindness Session will include sharing works from classic and contemporary including Edgar Allen Poe, Naomi Shihab Nye, Ross Gaye, Maya Angelou, as well as selected poems from attendees.

Once the attendees discuss poems, they’ll be encouraged to think of incidents where they recognize kindness from life experiences, friends and acquaintances, and how it affected their lives. From there, writers will be encouraged to create a first draft of poetry. Writers will read their poems, and be encouraged to revise a first draft by the first week of December.  We’ll have a Zoom get-together with feedback from each other. By Christmas we’ll have created the first part of an online anthology on blogspot, which poets will study, and make “final” corrections. The anthology will go live in 2025. Over the next few years, we’ll be adding more poems to the anthology from other workshops.

Elisabeth von Uhl earned an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. Her work has been published in Lunch Ticket, The Cortland Review, SHIFT, cream city Review, The Watershed Review, and other journals and anthologies. She won a 2021 "Bronx Recognizes Its Own" Award, Her chapbook Ocean Sea, and was published by Finishing Line Press. She’s won scholarships and fellowships to Vermont College's Postgraduate Writing Conference, Prague Summer Writer's Seminar, and Greenwich Village Writing workshop. Visit www.elisabethvonuhl.com.

Anne Leighton appears on the Grammy-nominated album, Healthy Food for Thought: Good Enough to Eat, (Audio & Video Labs) reading her poem “Feed Your Parents Well.” She’s contributed to The Indie Collaborative, The Literary Parrot, Elephant Journal. Her poetry book The Leighton Explosion made enough of a profit to use her earnings to record an original song, “Got My Eye on You, Santa,” which found her a publishing deal with Sheer Music South Africa/Downtown Music, USA.  Visit workinggalrockandroll.blogspot.com.

For more information, please reach out to Elisabeth and/or Anne at e.vonuhl@gmail.com and LeightonMedia@aol.com. 

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The New Normal By Anne Leighton

 It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

-"1984" by George Orwell, 1949

There’s bad weird and good weird. Some bad weird folks have complained about me for a range of issues, including an obsession I have of making things happen. I’m a music publicist and love promoting some of the less popular recording artists. Traditional poets have put me down for feeling comfortable with rock-oriented and hip hop poets as well as off-the-wall writers from Dr. Seuss to Walt Whitman. I’ve believed in mending fences with people that are bullies. I like to dance at record release parties, even though some of my friends in the music community that’s unprofessional.  Through the years I’ve heard “abnormal” and synonyms used to describe me.

Recently I discovered large scale societal backing to boldly declare that “I’m normal, especially for me.” This includes having insight to set goals and solve challenges to make my part of the world a better place. 

Some of my skills fit needs for the Kamala Harris – Tim Walz campaign. The online get-togethers have been blowing my mind because some of the speakers share personal stories about ways they learned to make the world a nicer place.

I had a hard time in the Bronx trying to find leaders that care about me. Even females in my borough’s Democratic Party support bullying, and, actually, put down people asking for help.  I remember a female crossing guard that refused to help me, at age 60, cross the street. When I was a kid, there was a phrase, “Help the old lady cross the street!” I had to wait for a civilian to come by to ask her to hold my hand to get to the other side of a four-lane street.

Weird. Huh?

Novelist Min Jin Lee (“Free Food for Millionaires,” “Pachinko”), who went to Bronx High School of Science, choked up as she told us at an online Women for Harris National Organizing meeting, "I was raised to believe that love conquers fear, that forgiveness is possible and that every person is my sister and brother, and we are sent to heal a broken world."

The Kamala Harris online community includes people who were confounded—for years--by mean behavior.  The speakers helped us strengthen our self-realizations that it’s always been “them (the people doing weird things)” not us. They instructed us to be of service not to be power hungry for the win: “Welcome our voters.” and “How do we talk to them? Listen. What do they care about?”  

The discussion about people’s “weird behavior” resonated with me.  There are people that I love that hurt those that are helping them; unfriendly actions make them –ultimately- hinder their own development.         

Harris and Walz attribute “weird” to people that want to look down on others, and run their lives or condemn them for wanting help for themselves or their families. It’s astonishing the amount of people that don’t want healing.  

I want to feel better; understanding that it’s “weird” behavior to put me down for speaking up for myself is melting half my trauma. Maybe more.  Now my tears are calming, grateful, and full of wonder.           

Kamala stated “We deserve a leader who understands that our differences do not divide us. They are an essential source of our strengths.” That’s motivation for a better America, and should be the normal way of life for all of us.    

20^th Century Indian Philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti said, “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”  

After Trump was elected in 2016, I worked hard to mend fences with people that had bullied me. I began speaking up louder to community politicians, and have continued this work.  If a person behaving “weird” to others was in a minority in a group I’m associated with, I turned to support groups for advice and comfort. Some responded with an encouraging phone call or email. Some didn’t. Each encounter with a potential supporter or detractor offered revelations that I use in new encounters in the weird and normal realms of my journeys.   

When I was in the fourth grade, our principal spoke about bullying on our school’s morning announcements program. I hope teachers can ask their students questions like, “Do you find if you use your energy in a mean way that it ultimately hurts you?”  Like frowning, it takes more energy to deliberately create problems for others. People have to make efforts to look for fault with others doing good things, which ends up destroying relationships. Plus, it wastes time when we could be improving our lives and doing positive things like cleaning cat litter….

In the writing work I do, I think using my talents to be the change I want to see is done by recognizing negativity when I express it and when it’s pushed at me, and seeing what I can do to turn it into a positive action. Now I let people know, “If you don't want me to call you ‘weird,’ stop being weird.”

Let’s create normal, and focus on the importance for kind behavior, while showing gratitude for it.

I feel healed, finally understanding that I only thought I wasn’t as good a person as my abusers.  Now I know I love this healing message that most of the time I’ve been normal.