Friends—today’s bonus post is special. Denise Derya Brandt is a past participant in the Writing Your Legacy: The Piece by Piece Approach workshop. She brought a special bowl to explore the object-based storytelling method. Using notes and ideas developed in the workshop, she crafted this beautiful essay and I’m so grateful she let me share it with you.
The next workshop is happening THIS MONDAY, June 22, at 5pm (MT). It’s only one hour and it’s on Zoom. There are still a few spots left. Register here. ✍️
The Bowl
This vintage brass floral-embossed hammam bowl belonged to my Turkish mother. I don’t remember a time during my childhood when it wasn’t in our bathtub, a constant presence as familiar as my mother’s voice, a voice I long to but can no longer hear.
Before I came into the world, my mother carried a private grief. After several years of marriage, she and my father struggled to conceive. She blamed herself, believing somehow that God was withholding this gift as punishment. Then, on a visit back to Bursa, Türkiye, she went with family and neighbors to the local hammam, an ancient, steamy sanctuary where Turkish women have gathered for centuries to wash and socialize. While there, she prayed and made a promise: if God would allow her to have a baby, she would return with her and pay for everyone’s hammam session. Maybe she brought the bowl home from that trip. Maybe not. The details are hers alone, and she’s gone now, so I’ll never know.
What I do know is this: fourteen years after my parents married, my mother got pregnant with me.
And she loved me. She bathed me with this bowl.
I remember the ritual of it, the way she would tell me to tip my head back, then she’d lift the bowl and pour a slow, steady stream of fresh warm water over my hair, rinsing away the shampoo suds, always taking care to keep the soap from my eyes. In those moments, love wasn’t something she said. It was something she did, with her hands, with water, with this bowl. “Stand up,” she would say when we were finished. I would rise, and she would tell me to use one foot to scrub the top of the other. Then she would fill the bowl one final time and pour it over me, a full, complete rinse. Sure, a shower might have been more efficient, but we are Turks, and Turks take baths!
I don’t know exactly how the bowl came to live with me after my mother died. I can’t remember if I grabbed it or if my husband grabbed it. Maybe I told him to. In any case, I’m grateful it’s with me now. I don’t take as many baths as I used to, most days preferring the efficiency of a shower, but when I do sink into the tub, I reach for this bowl, and my mother is suddenly close again.
And now there is another layer of love held in this metal. One year, my husband polished the brass bowl as a surprise gift. It was such a thoughtful gift, yet I felt a small, complicated pang of loss when I saw it gleaming like new. He had buffed away the patina, that dark accumulation of years and water and memory pressed into the surface of the brass. I didn’t say much about it. How do you explain to someone you love that you treasured the tarnish?
But I have watched with some satisfaction the shine begin to dull again. New memories are leaving their mark on my precious bowl. That is, I think, what objects like this one do. They receive our days and our grief and our love and our ordinary Tuesday evenings, and they keep it all.
Thank you, Denise. Denise also writes a wonderful monthly newsletter, Postcards & Pages, here on Substack. It’s one of my favorites.
Want to give the workshop a try? It really is for anyone. You don’t have to be a writer. You don’t have to share a word if you don’t want to. You simply have to bring yourself and one special thing, keepsake, or memento. You never know what story’s inside of you, waiting for a little nudge.❤️ Register here.
Denise Derya Brandt is a debut author whose fiction and nonfiction writing is inspired by her life and the lives of the people she met while working for more than two decades in international development, leading life-saving women's health projects in Afghanistan, Liberia, and Myanmar (with shorter stints in other interesting places). She's a graduate of The Book Incubator writing program, was a 2024 finalist for the Women's Fiction Writers Association Rising Star Award, and was a 2025 Poets & Writers Get the Word Out publicity incubator fellow. She holds a bachelor's degree in political science from Arizona State University and a master's degree in development management from The London School of Economics. After graduate school, Denise lived in Istanbul, where she worked as an Associate Publisher for Turkish Business World, an English-language business magazine. As a Turkish-American with moderate Turkish language skills, she claims she can fool tourists but not taxi drivers! Originally from Arizona, Denise now lives in Northern Kentucky with her husband. Her debut novel, Istanbul Dreaming, is forthcoming from She Writes Press on September 29, 2026.
Thank you so much for posting my essay and for hosting these meaningful workshops! Object-based storytelling unlocks so many memories and is a wonderful way to preserve stories. Thank you for guiding me through the process. I look forward to the next workshop!