Inspired by the Memoir Writing Workshop by Women Writing last Saturday, February 7, we begin Reading for Care: How Literature Holds Us, a new blog series that centers on attention and awareness to the beauty of words and how it holds space for readers like us. All you need is a pen and a paper (or a notebook) and 10-20 minutes time allotment for journaling. The instructions are simple: Read the poem for the week. Sit with it. Write responses in your journal.
Note:
This is a reading and journaling space, not therapy. Please feel free to pause or step away whenever you need to.
Here we go! Arrival: Notice this photo and stay in the moment of noticing. Breathe. Inhale. Exhale. Do this 3-5 times.
Encounter the poem, The Little Plant in the Window Speaks by Annette Wynne. The Little Plant on the Window Speaks
If you had let me stay all winter long outside,
Long, long ago, I should have died.
And so I'll live for you and keep
A little summer while the others sleep—
A little summer on your window-sill—
I'll be your growing garden spot until
The rough winds go away,
And great big gardens call you out to play.
When Literature Holds: Journal prompts 1. What did you notice, visually, in sound, or in feeling, as you read? 2. Which line felt steady or comforting? Write it in your journal. 3. What image from the poem stayed with you? Did it bring a memory, a place, or a person to mind?
Extending the experience (only if you wish or if the spirit is nudging towards generosity), you can: 1. Share a similar photo on your socmed account. 2. Do something artistic or creative. 3. Read more poetry: The Human Touch, Weighing the World
Thank you for dropping by. May you find shelter in what you notice.
I'm sharing the texts I used in the workshop on the Memoir with and by Women Writing. Reading to Settle and Stay with Fragility
• Berry, Wendell. The Peace of Wild Things. Poem. From
Collected Poems of Wendell Berry. Counterpoint, 2012.
• Kalanithi, Paul. When Breath Becomes Air. Memoir.
Random House, 2016.
• Didion, Joan. The Year of Magical Thinking. Memoir.
Alfred A. Knopf, 2005.
Reading for Recognition (Mirrors)
• Howe, Marie. What the Living Do. Poem. From What the
Living Do. W.W. Norton, 1998.
• Baticulon, Ronnie. Some Days You Can’t Save Them All.
Memoir. Anvil Publishing, 2018.
• Smith, Maggie. Good Bones. Poem. First published 2016.
Reading for Perspective (Windows)
• Hopkins, Gerard Manley. Pied Beauty. Poem. First
published 1918.
• Alejo, Bert. Tagpi-tagping Kariktan. Filipino
translation of Pied Beauty.
• Evasco, Marjorie (ed.). Viral Signs. Poetry anthology.
University of the Philippines Press, 2017.
Reading that Opens Possibility (Doors)
• Adams, Sarah. Be Cool to the Pizza Dude. Essay. From
Letters from a Father.
• Gay, Ross. The Book of Delights. Essay collection.
Algonquin Books, 2019.
• Didion, Joan. Keeping a Notebook. Essay. First
published 1968.
When news of BTS walking the King’s Path broke across social media, many of us instinctively affixed “of the King” to the word return. As an author of folklore retellings and someone who has studied folk art, I think this calls for unpacking. BTS’s album title is Arirang, positioned as a folk song, a song of the people. An intangible art. Folk songs are art whose material is people. They are intangible not because they are unreal, but because they live only through being carried across seasons, borders, and generations.
I am not rejecting honor, especially when ARMYs before me have invested deep fan labor. I am staying true to the form of Arirang as an art in itself, which BTS has chosen to name their comeback album. Seen this way, BTS engaging Arirang is not merely converting cultural heritage into pop. It is them stepping into a role that is older than pop: the carrier. The bearer of culture. BTS is moving from palace threshold to civic space to open square. From history into the present. From one voice to many. Kinship, in this reading, is not symbolic. It is structural. Folk songs are never held by the singer alone; they survive because they are sustained by a chorus. This is where ARMY enters not just as audience, not merely as consumers, but as co-carriers.
Millions of us will never meet, yet we recognize ourselves in the same song, at the same time, across distance and difference. That shared act of listening, repeating, and remembering is what turns sound into belonging. When BTS sings Arirang, they are not simply addressing a market; they are calling a kin group into being again. A people imagined into relation through voice, timing, and care. This is not fandom as hierarchy nor a parasocial relationship. It is community as chorus. This is also why, for me, the shorthand “kings of K-pop” fails to hold. Kingship relies on vertical power, singular ascent, and fixed centers. What BTS has built over a decade and more, does not move that way, despite ARMY’s valiant campaigns across charts and voting seasons. BTS’s work spreads laterally through themes that recur rather than resolve (the Möbius strip at Sowoozoo), through members who diverge and return without severing the root (solo mixtapes, songs, and projects during the enlistment era), through listeners who form countless nodes of meaning across cultures and generations (ARMY as a diverse fandom). In this structure, nothing depends on a throne. Nothing requires a crown. The song moves because people move with it. If this return matters, it is not because rulers are being restored, but because a shared imagination is being renewed, one that resists enclosure, survives translation, and remains alive precisely because it does not belong to anyone alone.
A folk song’s light flickers. It endures not because it is fixed, but because it is vulnerable enough to be carried. Its life depends on repetition, memory, and people choosing to keep singing even when conditions are uncertain or difficult. Spectacle can amplify it, but it can also thin it out. Smoothing the roughness, closing the gaps where ordinary people once stepped in. Kinship is what protects the song here. When meaning is shared rather than owned, when the chorus matters as much as the voice at the center, the song stays alive. What is at risk in moments like this is not relevance, but intimacy. So I stay with the tension. I let the scale be what it is, and I keep my attention on the smaller movements: how the song is framed, how restraint is practiced, how space is left open for listeners to enter. Folk traditions survive not by being resolved into monuments, but by remaining passable: hand to hand, voice to voice, generation to generation. If Arirang continues to flicker through this return, it will be because kinship, not kingship, is doing the carrying. More Recent Articles
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