Green Girl Weaving: An Evening of Poetry and Music

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"Green Girl Weaving is a tender and courageous journey through grief, love, and the slow reweaving of life after the death of a loved one. This collection offers a compassionate companion for anyone learning to live with grief while remaining rooted in love."

-Aditi Sethi, MD, Founder and Executive Director, Emberlight

In 2025, Mary Jo Amani walked into a coffee shop in Asheville and found Sara Elizabeth Bell's paintings on the wall. What followed was a collaboration neither of them planned. Sara painted in response to poems Mary Jo had been writing since her son's death a decade ago. Mary Jo wrote new poems in response to Sara's work. Green Girl came into being somewhere between them, and the book that resulted holds both.

We invite you to spend an evening with it. Mary Jo, Sara, and Emberlight founder Aditi Sethi will host the evening together. Mary Jo will read from Green Girl Weaving, and open a conversation about how grief shows up: how it arrives unannounced, how it changes shape, how it asks something different of each person it visits. Sara's paintings from the Green Girl series will be on display, with originals and cards available, and Sara will be there to talk about the work. Music will be woven throughout, with moments of call and response. You are welcome to lend your voice, and just as welcome to sit quietly and let the song move around you. There will be refreshments.

Mary Jo writes that green girl arrived in response to a woman expressing her grief, and that she carries grace, gratitude, and acceptance with her. Grief is always present, and it is wrapped in a cloak of joy. Both things are true at once, which is something this community understands.

Two of the values we practice at Emberlight are alive in an evening like this one. Loving Presence asks us to listen deeply and bear witness without hurrying anyone toward resolution, and Mary Jo has found that the green girl poems open a place for others to bring their own grief and be heard. Curiosity asks us to stay open at the edge of what we do not understand, and grief is among the great unknowns, never arriving twice in the same way. It takes courage to speak from that depth, and it takes a room willing to receive it.

Mary Jo Amani is a member of Emberlight. Her husband, Todd, spent his last days here in January of this year. Over the past few decades her work has included founding Libros para Niños, a nonprofit fostering a love of reading through community libraries in Nicaragua, Guatemala, and Mozambique. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Pacific University and settled in Swannanoa with Todd in 2019. You can find her work at maryjoamani.com.

Sara Elizabeth Bell has been drawing since she was a child. She earned her BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art, raised two children in Northern California, and now lives in Western North Carolina, where she walks off the beaten path into the mountains to find quiet places to sit and draw. Time in the forest is her respite, and she returns from it with a clearer mind for the rest of her life and her work.

We will gather on the Emberlight campus, 83 Sanctuary Rd, Swannanoa, NC 28778. Please contact events@emberlightway.org with any questions.

This event is free and open to everyone. When you register, you will find a place to make a donation if you are able and moved to. There is no cost to the people who come to spend their final weeks at Emberlight, and no cost to their families. Gifts from this community are what keep it that way. Give what feels right and possible for you.