Beth Girard offered a session on May 28.
Beth did her first writing at fifteen when she rewrote the ending for Gone With The Wind. She couldn’t bear Rhett Butler turning down Scarlett, and thought that Margaret Mitchell had got it all wrong. At fifteen you know these things, right?
Once she got over her disappointment about Rhett, she went on to have careers as an educator, a social worker, and now as an AWA Facilitator.
She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from York University, a Diploma from Ryerson University, and completed two years of a five-year program at the Centre for Training in Psychotherapy. She continues to take writing workshops and to develop her skills as a facilitator in conjunction with her AWA colleagues.
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by Laura Wershler
What matters then, when the world is in near tatters, a semblance of its former self? What matters then, when your own daily life has been simplified to its bones? * What matters then, is that the food I prepare and share with my partner feeds both our bodies and our souls. * What matters then, is the provincial park just a five-minute walk away from our home. * What matters is that red-winged blackbirds return to the marsh, that we hear their melodious song as they stop and start and flirt and court among last year’s dried-out cattails. * What matters is the robin’s nest we find in the spruce tree in our front yard. What matters is that four brilliant blue eggs hatch before the magpies can devour them. * What matters is the space we give a mother and her nestlings to successfully reproduce in trying times. Stay vigilant. Shoo away marauders. Laugh as we watch—from the window—a baby robin hop across our backyard. * What matters is the lilt in my son’s voice as we chat on the phone, a thousand kilometres between us. It doesn’t matter we haven’t seen him in a year and a half—well, it does matter—but what really matters is that we are still in each other’s lives despite our separation. * What matters is embracing opportunity—to meet in a safe space with others to write and share our thoughts in spoken words. * What matters are the outcomes of surrender to the changes in our lives: re-established friendships, online writing workshops, learning to draw, our deep absorption in the spring of 2020, its slow and arduous advance documented at #pandemicparkwalks. * What matters is that for every thing that changed, some things stayed the same. Still here, still you, still me, still together. * What matters then? That life goes on, with every day a chance to reinvent, rediscover, rejuvenate, reverberate with the joys and sorrows of just living.
Thank you for joining us to Write Around the World!
For the rest of the summer, watch our blog! We are sharing writing from AWA’s yearly marathon fundraiser, which happened this year all-online throughout the month of May.
We offer this series in appreciation for the incredible community of writers and workshop leaders that sustain us. If you’re inspired and would like to be part of the fundraiser, please donate!