Every May, AWA workshop leaders across the globe bring writers together. Leaders help AWA raise funds by offering donation-based writing groups. Proceeds from each session support AWA and its mission. New writers experience the AWA method and celebrate the unique creativity in each other’s voices.
Write Around The World 2024 is nearly here! Check out this year’s event calendar and sign up for your chance to produce some great writing, engage with a supportive community and experience the magic of AWA. We’re offering groups nearly every day!
This writing was done in Diana Damato’s workshop during last year’s WAW.
Untitled by Betsy Perry
My body is holding me up to emerge at last from my cabin on board the USS America. The year is 1913, and I’ve been on this transatlantic journey for eight days. In my 26 years, I have never been so sick, so unable to even hold a drop or two of water in my stomach, and so alone. The eight days and nights of fever and losing anything I took into my body has been a nightmare I’d like never to repeat. I so wanted my dear mother thousands of miles away in New Hampshire. What would she say to me if she were here? Would she give me a talking-to for being such a risk-taker on this journey to foreign lands? Would she comfort me—her words holding me warmly and secure like my grandmother’s quilt?
What would I say to her? I’m afraid the words coming now to my doubting self would not comfort mother or even my stalwart father. Why did I ever decide to go on this journey? What made me want to cross the Atlantic, the Aegean, and travel over land via a camel caravan to Armenia? Maybe it’s the sea sickness that is stripping away my resolve and what little body fat I had—telling me to go back, go back, go back. God does not need you over there! If I wrote home now, I would beg them to come meet me in Athens and take me home. Would they come?
As I rest now on the deck of the USS America in my deck chair covered in several woolen blankets even with the sun shining, I hear the ocean lapping at the sides of the ship as if telling me to stay steady. One wave at a time, one moment at a time, one breath at a time—one, one, one. This mantra-like rhythm pulls me away from the fear and the unknown. I enter into a familiar and most welcomed place of silence trusting in the Oneness of all. Somehow, I know I’ll be just fine.