Leslie Jamison
“I was told I’d recognize Still Waters in a Storm from a sign in the window, and I did. It was a crayon sign. It just said: “Love.” The moment I walked inside, I felt something in me shift: it was easy to take off my shoes, sink into a couch, talk to one girl about why she loved roller coasters and another girl about why she didn’t. There was pizza. There was yoga. There was an ease in the air, a comfort–the warmth of enduring community. There were questions. We talked about how writing can feel like freedom. We talked about writing the difficult stuff. Then we wrote. The kids read what they’d written, and it moved me past what I can fully describe: they wrote about their parents—their parents getting angry, getting tired, getting surgery—they wrote about red ants; they wrote about bullies. When someone was reading, everyone listened. The energy of this listening was intense—a kind of humidity in the air. I felt graced by it. I felt graced by the trust in the room; I felt graced by the incredible words that bloomed from it. What I heard and felt there, I won’t soon forget. It took my breath away, and helped me remember why I write in the first place—what words can do, what kinds of spaces they can build. Still Waters is simply extraordinary.”