The Magic of OAI
by Anne Barnhart
It’s that time of year again, my favorite time of the RIWP calendar, a time when we don our backpacks and bug spray and set out into the wilds of Rhode Island. For those of you, dear readers, who have never experienced an Open Air Institute (OAI), it is my highest hope that one day you do. It’s difficult to explain the experience. If you were to open the RIWP website, you would read:
The Open Air Institute is a place-based form of professional development that integrates state and local history, geography, and culture with writing and educational practices. This unique, largely outdoor opportunity exposes participants to a wide variety of locations and experiences as we explore the features that make Rhode Island special. Each year’s event centers around a common theme. Past years’ themes have included topics ranging from rivers and coastlines to libraries and farms.
And you may wonder what exploring a theme like “Origins” through Newport, Barrington, and Coventry could create for you. But until you do it, you wouldn’t know what it’s like to become one with the towns and cities of our amazing gem of a state, until you, perhaps: sit in witness in the states’s oldest surviving house of worship imagining a Society of Friends or stand in the kitchen of the state’s oldest surviving historic home turned Center for Black for Black History staring a spiritual bundle that reflects tradition and hope and survival; traipse through a community garden or trace the edge of a pond that gifted the clay to build a town; wander through the woods along a pond filled with legends of a rubied, carbunkle-clad serpent or meander through a homestead of a couple who helped shape the history of our state and nation — all the while experiencing the magic of three days under the guidance of and alongside other teachers/writers/ardent learners/lovers of life.
At each stop, imagine yourself carving a reflective space for writing, scratching fictional dialogues between historical figures, crafting personal legends, drafting mundane musings in response to a simple invitation to write. This is where the Writing Project magic stitches itself in and patchworks itself with others in the group as we wrap our community with our shared words.
In the spirit of that communion, I want to share this piece I wrote this week in response to one of the many facilitator-provided prompts, one where we used an epigraph from the figures featured at our final stop. I chose this poem out of all of my writes because not only does it bring me joy, but also it reflects some of my thinking and learning across the three days by touching on the subtheme of resilience within the blanket idea of origins, by trying to approach the complexities inherent in not simply waiting for ruin but in both accepting and subverting circumstance, by drawing inspiration from sitting by Coventry’s Carbunkle Pond when a little fish disrupted my quiet with a gift of inspiration, by braiding that thread into what we had just learned about the bright and bold Block Islander — and dare I say better half of Nathaniel Greene — Caty Littlefield.
Untitled Quick Write 8/6/26
“It shall never be told me, that I set myself down quietly and waited for my ruin.”
— Catharine Littlefield Greene
The splash turns out not to be
a rock plop but a fish flopping
in a quicksilver flash.
See its slick slime skid and skip
across the rough craters of concrete,
mercurial in its reverse — see its exosphere glow.
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It is drowning
in the gravity, suspended,
in a cosmos extranatant,
terrestrial in its nascent trekking
and gasping for air.
It thinks the swimming is not the problem,
as it orbits unmoved and moving,
but the forgetting. The weightless flow,
the float of needing to survive. It thinks
it is not about this celestial probability of death,
so it flips again and again and again with a grin
and a Dzhanibekov spin and does not stop
until the plop is not a rock but a will to live,
iron-clad, and flapping in its microgalactic clapping.
It is experiences like OAI that represent what the RIWP means to me. The Open Air Institute always reminds me to slow down, to notice, to ask, to challenge, to grow, to play, to write, to reflect, to listen, to wonder, to witness, to connect, to collect the ways of being and seeing I want for my students.
I encourage you to live the OAI spirit this year. You can sign up for a one-day school year-style OAI, the three-day summer OAI, or just create your own mini OAI vibe yourself or with your students. Reach out to me (abarnhart@westerly.k12.ri.us) or any other board member for more information about how you can join the magic.
Anne Barnhart is a former co-director and current executive board member for the Rhode Island Writing Project. She teaches ELA and Creative Writing at Westerly High School in Westerly, Rhode Island.
