Full Moon — January 13, 2025
Hello You,
Tonight marks the first full moon of the year, the Wolf Moon. There aren’t any true wolves in my neck of the woods, but there are plenty of coyotes (some even suspect they might actually be coywolves—part coyote, part wolf) and this time of year marks the start of their mating season, so I’ve been hearing a haunting night chorus of yips and howls echoing through the woods behind the house on the regular.
Lately, I’ve felt like throwing back my head and howling too. In my case, it’s been more of an urge, as uncle Walt Whitman wrote in “Song of Myself,” to “sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.”
Whenever I teach teen writing workshops, we start the day by heading outside and letting out a long, loud YAWP to remind ourselves that we’ve alive. I highly recommend it. Perhaps tonight?
Postcards from the No Exit Café
As I mentioned in yesterday’s newsletter, I’ve decided to start including a writing exercise in each Voice of the Moon Monthly. They’re not meant to be overly difficult or involved, but something to get your heart, head, and hand moving in new and restorative ways.
My current novel-in-progress is set, in part, on a dead end road, in a magical, seaside café, hence the name for this series of short writing challenges. There’s no pressure to complete them on any sort of schedule, but I encourage you to share your thoughts on the monthly exercise in the comments, and even post a taste of your writing if you like! Comments can only be seen by the members of the Voice of the Moon Monthly and I’ll be checking in regularly to see how everyone is doing. (If there’s interest, I may start to schedule a live chat down the road to go along with the exercises, too. )
And with that, here’s your first postcard!
An Inventory of Being
(and a little story)
There is a poem that I affectionately call “the Ellie poem,” that I’ve regularly brought to my writing workshops over the years. Some of you may have heard of it before, since it’s been shared by writing instructors around the world for decades. For the longest time, I couldn’t find an accurate, detailed description of how the poem came about. All I knew was that the original ‘Ellie’ was written by a woman named Eleanor Wait in 1967 and it was titled: “Ellie: An Inventory of Being.” In the fumbling eloquence of young womanhood, Ellie shared her ideas about exactly who she was. It felt as if she’d written the poem just for herself, listing dreams alongside fleeting thoughts. From the moment I first read it, I fell in love.
Way back when I first had a blog, (and before I published my first novel) I wrote a post about my love for the poem and publicly asked anyone who might have information about the poem and its poet to please get in touch. Much to my amazement, I wound up hearing from “Ellie” herself.
Here’s an excerpt from the follow up blog post from 2005
Ellie Found!
Case closed. I found “Ellie”. (Actually, she found me.) Yesterday [in 2005] I received the following email:
“Dear Ami,
Well, you’ve found me! I’m the author of Ellie: An Inventory of Being. It won first prize in Whit Burnett’s STORY MAGAZINE poetry competition and was published in STORY: THE YEARBOOK OF DISCOVERY 1968. I had pretty much forgotten about it … although I was thrilled at the time to be published and, especially, to have the poem praised by Marianne Moore, who judged the contest.
As I anticipated in the poem, after college I stopped using the name “Eleanor” or “Ellie” and became “Lea,” and, as Lea Wait, I’ve lived the past 35 years and published adult mysteries, historical novels for children, and nonfiction about my experiences as the single adoptive parent of four Asian daughters.
So — your mystery has been solved. And how thrilled I am that anyone actually has read the little poem I scribbled out when I was a junior in
college!”
And now back to 2025
Below, you’ll find the poem, and below that, a few tips on how to write your own Inventory of Being. The original poem is quite long, so don’t feel any pressure to write anything that lengthy (unless you want to!) No matter how you approach it, in my opinion, everyone should try to compose their own “Ellie” at least once in their lives. And, if you happen to have written one before, please try your hand at writing a new version for this moment, right now. It’s an amazing way to see just how much our lives shift and grow and change over time.