By Jen Blesso and Jane Roper
Editor’s note: In this series of posts, we’ll share the pieces from The Art of Words, on view in the gallery of Follow Your Art Community Studios from November 3rd to 27th, 2021. For this collaborative exhibit, FYACS’s writers and artists exchanged words and art and prompted each other to respond in their given mediums. Find out what happens when words and art come together.
Prompt
And So It Began
by Jennifer Blesso, mixed media collage

Response
And So It Began
by Jane Roper
And so it began: First, the temples and churches and mosques. Then the banks, the government buildings, the corporate headquarters, and the courthouses. Finally, the police stations and prisons and army bases. The women fell upon them with their buckets and mops and brooms and rags. They scrubbed away the film of greed and fear that coated the walls and floors. They flung open the windows and let the wind carry away the fumes of abuse and back-room deals and codes of silence. They scoured and wiped, mopped and swabbed, until every wound and lie and injustice was rinsed away, and every inch of every room and corridor dripped with color and light. Then, satisfied, the women withdrew to wait for the people to return. They held their brooms and their breath. They hoped they’d done enough.
Prompt
Someday
by Jane Roper
Someday, so help me God, I will tell the world where you got the scar—the one that slices a seam between your thumb and forefinger.
Remember the story the two of you told? Your hand brushed against a knife hiding in the dishwater. I accepted it, but the physics of the thing were off. How could a brush against something yield a wound so brutal?
Your mother just wouldn’t stop bleeding.
There was a trip to the ER, surgery, a splint.
And then one day, loose with wine, the two of us alone, you told me the truth: His hands around your neck as he bent you backward over the sink. You, grabbing a knife from the block, slamming it against the granite. The knife stopped, but not your hand. It slid the length of the blade.
It was such a stupid thing to do, you said.
And: Don’t tell him I told you.
That was almost twenty years ago. He’s been dead for more than a year now. Your friends, if they remember, still think it was the dishwater.
And you—you still can’t make a fist.
Response
Someday
by Jennifer Blesso, mixed media collage

Jen Blesso is an abstract artist, teacher, and the Arts for All Coordinator at FYACS. She guides individuals with special needs in art activities. She is drawn to fiber arts, mixed media and is currently working in acrylics – layering and working up colors while adding various materials. Paper, metal, tree bark, sequins and other found objects are incorporated into her work to create texture and interest.
Jane Roper is the author of a memoir, Double Time: How I Survived–and Mostly Thrived–Through the First Three Years of Mothering Twins, and a novel, Eden Lake. Her novel The Society of Shame, will be published by Anchor Books in 2023. Jane’s writing has appeared in Salon, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The Millions, Poets & Writers, The Rumpus, Cognoscenti, Writers’ Digest and elsewhere, and has been included in the anthology Labor Day: True Birth Stories by Today’s Best Women Writers.
Read more stories on Palette.