Sonia Greenfield’s Recommended Reading List and Inspired Prompts

Had a migraine, so I am definitely not with it today. I do want to share the list of poems that Sonia Greenfield shared on Facebook though. I hope you enjoy the poems as much as I have. You can read her own poems on her website. Btw, Sonia’s book All Possible Histories is amazing, and she has a new book out, Helen of Troy is High AF, which sounds awesome. Links to purchase the books on also found on her website.

Your first prompt is to write a response to one of these poems. You can do so however you wish: use a line from one of them for an epigraph or a golden shovel, create a conversation to a poem, or take lines from several and write a cento.

Your second prompt, inspired by Sonia’s new book, is to write a short story or poem from the personal historical or mythological figure(s) who is “high AF”: what kinds of snacks do they reach for, what ex do they want to text or send an animal messenger to, what obsesses them at that moment (the play of light on a stream, flickering torch, the laces on their shoes)?

Bonus prompt: what the hell is my new kitty thinking? Trick question: nothing! Write from the perspective of the void (or of Onyx, aka Goofball).

Have fun!

Surgeries and Separations—A Rant with Prompts and Taxidermy (NSFW)

I am still working on the prompt I’d started, but I wanted to get something out for a prompt or at least start a discussion. You have probably often heard that we should “separate the artist from the art” by people who want to continue promoting the writing or other artwork by a racist shithead or a rapist or abuser of some kind.

My opinion: fuck that. Our lives inform the art we make, and art comes from more than just an individual but from a surrounding community. If someone abused/abuses other artists within a community, that person doesn’t deserve to be uplifted by that same community (or a larger one).

Obviously, this is a decision every person has to make individually, and each situation (and its context) differs. For me, I have less of a problem of sharing, teaching, and promoting the work of a dead writer who no longer materially benefits, but I also want to focus more on living artists. Of course, there are writers who do or have done terrible things to others that I am unaware of; I am not a part of elite literary circles and am generally an outsider for even the larger Southern California writing community. Promoting and buying the work of generous and supportive writers is my goal. I appreciate all the guidance and encouragement I have received.

So, yes, I am a judgmental ass, but you probably already figured that out. And, sorry, Dad, I know I promised to work on using the f-word and other profanity less often. One resolution already down.

Now on to the prompts!

For the first prompt, write a poem on how to remove yourself from your writing, a kind of reverse ars poetica if you will. How would you erase your perspective or voice? What particular techniques or style is your writing known for? Self-deprecation is welcome. Or have fun with boasting. Either way, enjoy yourself!

For the next prompt, describe a surgery on removing your writing from yourself. Is a particular poem in a section of your liver? Your gallbladder? Why does it need to be removed? Are all those embarrassing poems about your ex housed in your appendix and need to be cut out? Do you have sestinas in your tonsils? (I admire people who can write sestinas; mine suck, seriously.) Do all your unfinished drafts ache like an abscessed tooth?

So you may have heard of “poet voice.” How a poet reads their poems can annoy (or infuriate) others, and there are as many opinions on the right way to perform a poem or read poetry aloud as there are poets. If someone reading aloud differently than speaking conversationally annoys you, describe how “poet voice“ should be excised. Since my speaking voice sounds like a hyperactive chipmunk, I have tried (and mostly failed) to develop a deeper voice that can carry a room, so I am guilty of “poet voice.”

What voice or voices (or personas, if you prefer) do you carry within you? Are they past selves? Or do you carry a chorus of mentors/critics within you? Would you remove it/them if you could? If so, how could you remove them? Amputation? Lancing? Antibiotics or antifungals? Maggots to eat the rotting flesh? Describe the voice(s)/persona(s) and their removal in a poem or flash fiction.

Graphic photo below!

Over the weekend I went to the Oddities and Curiosities Expo: so much taxidermy and dead butterflies.

Would the removed poems/artistic inspiration/narrative voice(s) be stored wet?

In conjunction with the previous prompts, write an ekphrastic using the following (graphic) photo.

And for the final (weird) prompt: describe the diorama the surgeons would find if they searched inside you for your muses.

And, if you are wondering, why yes, I DO believe I have ADHD.

I hope this post hasn’t been too graphic or disturbing and that you have fun!

How to Say Goodbye—Prompts Inspired by InSight, the Mars Rover

With the holidays, I will likely be even more behind on prompts than usual. I will try to make this prompt the last sad one for the year. Try!

InSight, NASA’s Mars lander will soon lose power and go offline. Its last message is strangely heartbreaking. Here is the Guardian’s article on InSight and its mission on Mars.

For the first prompt, write your final goodbye in a poem.

For the next prompt, write a poem or short story from the perspective of a mission team member receiving Insight’s message or from one of its programmers.

Your next prompt is to write the final message from your coffeemaker, laptop, or appliance, or even your favorite sweater or chair. What kind of “life” did it have? Will it miss you?

For a final prompt, write your last moments from the perspective your household appliances, furniture, and decor.

Other People’s Prompts

Not feeling great tonight, so I am posting some prompts I saw on Twitter. I hope you all have a great night!

I tried to find the inspiration poem but could not. Larry Fagin (1937-2017) published twelve books. I am especially interested in his The List Poem: A Guide to Teaching & Writing Catalog Verse. And now I am contemplating my own mortality and lack of published books.

Anyhoo, here is another prompt that could work for a fiction or poetry.

Here is the article “The Mystery of the Blue Whale Songs” by Kristen French if you would like to read more. I found it fascinating as well as the sonic pollution hypotheses not found in French’s article but in a Twitter thread. I am going to miss Twitter.

And a bonus ekphrastic prompt:

(Be assured that we dumped this jar found in the back of the fridge out and refilled the hummingbird feeders with fresh sugar water).

Gotta love some colorful contamination!

Good luck writing!

Let’s Say—Prompts Inspired by Derrick Austin

Sorry for the delay this week. I will try to have another prompt tomorrow or if not, then by Tuesday. Tonight’s prompts are inspired by Derrick Austin’s “Little Epic.” I love the conversational tone paired with allusion and the grounding of abstractions.

For the first prompt, tell a summary of a well-known myth or fairy tale or TV series or even a horror franchise. Play with the story’s tropes and archetypes and use a similar conversational tone as “Little Epic.”

For the second prompt, use “Moonlight, stars, a good wind” as a ghostline. See where it takes you. Remember to delete the line and give credit to the poet.

The next prompt is more of a writing exercise. Create a series of lines in this format: “Who said [abstract noun] was a [sensory description of a place] / Who said it wasn’t a [different location/kind of place]. How many can you write? Do any of them spark a story?

For another exercise, begin with line of about destruction of a city or home or even a car or ship that has already occurred, place the survivor at that beginning of a journey but stop midway before safety is reached. Now switch from 3rd person to first person. What works for you?

Bonus prompt: Begin your journey here. What do you find around the bend?

Yikes, 6 Days into NaNoWriMo!

Hi all, I completely forgot about NaNoWriMo this year. Every November writers are challenged to write 50,000 words of a novel in any genre, and the NaNoWriMo organization provides events and platform to build a community and offer support.

Here is the faq to get you started.

I won’t be participating this year: I am focusing on poetry. I have managed the challenge in the past, and I’ll happily cheer you on.

Remember even if you are behind, you can try to catch up or just finish late. The goal is to create a daily writing habit and not let your internal editor stifle you. Good luck!

Image Courtesy of NaNoWri: Viking helm above a crest divided into quadrants (image of coffee cup in upper left, laptop in upper right, stack of pages in lower right, and crossed pens in lower left)

It’s Spooky Season Again!—Prompts

Tonight will be short prompts inspired by a neighbor’s yard: look at the following pictures and write a story or narrative poem describing what is happening here.

For the next prompt, write a persona poem for the vomiting skeleton.

Your final prompt is write a buddy story or a poem about friendship inspired by these two:

Good luck! Muahahahaha!

Emerge, Writer—A Prompt for the Equally Confused

Awards, grants, and publications are offered to emerging writers, but what do writers emerge from? Grammar lessons and emo music? Are writers hatched in MFA programs, transformed into soup before erupting out of cocoon and chrysalis, licked into form as bear cubs were once believed to be? Do writers emerge by writing themselves into the view of editors, judges, and publishers? Is it similar to a debutante’s introduction to society? Is there a secret curtsy?

How did you emerge as a writer? What is your origin story? What genre does it fit? Myth or rom com or horror? If a mystery, who died? Do you have a body and a villain in your creation story?

First of all though, have you emerged? When will you? What or who will tell you that you have? Is there a yardstick involved? Where do you go next?

Write a short story or poem answering any of these questions, or none. Make it up as you go.

Poetry Prompts from Profiles—More Twitter Blessings

So I fell in love with the quote below, so much that I immediately followed the person and asked if I could use it for a prompt, so here we go.

For the first prompt, use the phrase “new liver, same eagles” as a ghostline. You probably don’t need to use “After My Sweet Baboo Redux or After @babsben unless you really want to.

For the next prompt, take a popular myth or fairytale and rewrite it in modern language or a very specific vernacular and setting, different from the original. Imagine Artemis being caught skinny-dipping on the first day of deer hunting season in Indiana, or the Princess and the Pea retold by a British tabloid.

For the final prompt, create a story or poem that embodies the mood of “new liver, same eagles” or make your own phrase that sums up the last year or, realistically, 2016 until probably 2022.

Bonus prompt: write an ekphrastic for this photo.

What Is Left—Prompts

I found the photo and the accompanying explanation lovely.

Remember a time when you received a shock, a stunning grief, when the entire world seemed frozen or you, yourself, seemed to experience life behind a thick wall of glass or ice. Write about the yourself as if you were that apple frozen upon the tree. Describe being encased in ice, the numbness, the silence.

Or write about the slow thawing. What brought you back to the world, dropped you out of a frozen world.

Bonus prompt: write an ekphrastic poem using these images.

Origins—Prompts Inspired by Jenny George

What is the birthplace of forgiveness, the first breath of loneliness, the origin story of poverty? Write a poem or short story that describes the viscerally. For inspiration, read Jenny George’s “The Dream of Reason.” I’m grateful to Chelsea Dingham for posting it. Do credit Jenny George for your inspiration.

Bonus Prompt: Use the line “People will do anything” as a ghostline and create a list poem. For an added constraint, do not begin or end with an example of violence. Remember to give credit to erase the line and credit the poet.

Write a F-U-4Ever Poem to 2020–Let’s Break Up Hard With This F***-UP of a Year

Oh, 2020, you have been a colossal dumpsterfire. We aren’t just going to ghost you. No. We are going to burn your favorite jacket, mock your “O” face on TikTok, and chat up your younger sibling. We are going to do unto you what you deserve. I’ll bring the kerosene and you the shovel. If you’ve forgotten some of the truly bizarre and terrible events of the year, here’s a reminder of some of the weirder ones.

For the first prompt, write a breakup letter or a blackmail note to 2020, whichever is needed. Get it all out now. No holding back, no pulled punches, no “let’s be friends.” We aren’t getting back together with this year. Variation on the prompt: take a set of items that represent the year to you—the calendar, a ticket refund receipt, a picture of your empty couch, an expired restaurant coupon, a printout of a furlough notification, or other loss and cut, crumple and shred the items. Reassemble into a Frankenstein’s monster of a document and see if you can create a found poem from the text or ekphrastic from possible images.

For a bonus prompt, write a curse for the biggest bastard(s) of the year. Be petty—let every step taken be barefoot on a Lego—to truly vicious. Make it so.

You may need to write a series of poems about the last four years…

In the “I” of the Beholder—Prompts for Unreliable Narrators

When I first started writing, I often switched the “you” within the poem, or the “you” I was addressing was unclear. Now I am more concerned with the “I” in my poems. Not persona poems—that is a whole (or rather fragmented) other conversation—pun intended.

The “I” in my daily life is just as ambiguous: I continue to be an unreliable narrator, always learning that I again was wrong and then learning that my correction was an overreaction to the original error. Even caution can be an overcorrection, and second guessing a mental tic.

I never know when I am in the right or just am left guessing my way through the dark. The light keeps changing on me. So do my guesses.

For the first prompt, experiment with an unreliable narrator. Leave clues for the audience (and yourself) to discover but avoid the sudden epiphany, which is hard to pull off after its centuries of overuse. I will always love that lightning realization in Edith Wharton’s “Roman Fever” and Jane Austen’s Emma, but I am wary of the puppet master allure.

For the second prompt, write about a time in which all you had believed about an event was merely a lie you had told yourself or a another’s lie that you believed about yourself. How did you realize you were wrong? Did someone tell you? Why did you believe that person?

Or for a slight variation, take an old poem about an event in your life and look at it through your current viewpoint. What changes; what does not? And more intriguingly do you expect that you will change stance on this same event in the future, in the next 10 minutes?

For the last prompt, write a conversation between “the poet” and the “speaker” in one of your poems. How do “you” and how you present yourself as a poet juxtapose in the poem? Is the poem a scene or a landscape?

The Interior World and Navigation—Prompts Inspired by Oliver de la Paz

I’ve joined a writing workshop under Eric Morago, and it’s pushing me to expand my focus from individual poems to collections—their structure, motifs and themes. Unless a poetry collection is clearly arranged for a specific purpose, I usually skip around and ignore the placement of individual poems, which of course doesn’t help me prepare my own manuscript. I am truly enjoying this broader perspective in looking at poetry.

As part of the class, each of us was assigned to choose a collection and discuss its organization and themes as well as create a writing prompt. I chose Oliver de la Paz’s The Boy in the Labyrinth, a book I had longed for after reading his poem “Autism Screening Questionnaire—Speech and Language Delay.” The beauty of the poem’s answers to the harsh clinical questions stunned me the elusive quality of metaphor and imagery slipping the pinning of categories seemed akin to both parenting and writing—or any creation.

The book itself uses the structure of the Greek ode with its strophe, antistrophe and epode further divided into episodes of the introductory “Chorus” word problem or fill-in-the-blank poem and subsequent Labyrinth prose poems. The movement and structure dramatize the Greek myth of the Minotaur and the Labyrinth. The inclusion of word problems and the three “Autism Screening Questionnaire” poems build upon themselves layer by layer, adding the outside world into an ever deeper interior. Sometimes the prose poems begin on the image from the previous as if we too are following the red string. Fascinating.

The poet discusses the structure here in an interview:

I almost always think of individual poems with respect to the poems adjacent to them—how a particular poem activates or negates the work surrounding it. I think in motif and pattern, and I love making bigger connections both in my own writing and in the work of writers whom I enjoy, either in individual poetry collections or a life’s work.

For the prompt, I want to use one of the Labyrinth prose poems for inspiration :

For the first prompt, create an interior world peopled by outside objects and internal responses. Let the objects move and fly and the senses intermingle within this self-constructed world.

For the second prompt, write a poem using the line “Pain is a layer” as a ghostline. Again, remember to erase that line but still credit the poet.

For a third prompt, write a poem using the following words from the poem: “torch,” “bird,” “surface,” “form,” “layer,” “tip,” “rock,” “stripes,” and “shadows” but use them as verbs instead of nouns.

For the final prompt, use the “Autism Screening Questionnaire — Speech and Language Delay” as inspiration in how to translate the clinical or the mundane into the specific and personal.

Sign and Tree—Another Twitter Ekphrastic

In life, we oscillate among the sign, the tree and the observer and sometimes embody all three at once. Write a poem or short story from the perspective of one of them. Is the observer a trespasser after the sign disappears? If it is illegible? Who belongs here? Who decides?

More pics here.

Now write about a time in which you observed yourself erasing a version of yourself.

A tree with a prediction or a paradox

“Show, Don’t Tell”—Another “Borrowed” Twitter Prompt

Describe an emotion without naming it—similar to a previous prompt in which you describe images but of a color but never name it. I think this is a good strategy generally to use to help you push beyond the first phrase and image to explore new connections.

Unread Poems and Their Poets—Prompts Inspired by Wanda Coleman

I agree with Devin Gael Kelly: these three lines of Wanda Coleman’s “Obituary”—and the entire poem—did break me.

For the first prompt, skip those first three lines and use the next—“This sunset should trouble / the sky” as a ghostline. Remember to drop the line and give credit to the poet (such as “after Wanda Coleman”).

For the second prompt, write a poem using the following word list from the poem: “hard,” “trouble,” “fault,” “fall,” “felled,” “sound,” “empty,” “will,” “mean,” and “bare.”

For a third prompt, write a love poem that you will never show to anyone. Then take that poem and create an erasure poem out of it by deleting all the tenderness and joy from the lines. What is left?

For a final prompt, write a story or poem from the perspective of the minor deity of unnoticed loves. Let this god/goddess send small blessings—a convenient parking space, a slight breeze on a hot day, exact change found in the pocket—upon the lovers.

It’s NaNoWriMo Time!!!

November is here again, and it’s time to write 50,000 words of that brand new novel you’ve been kicking around—all in one month. National Novel Writing Month is celebrated (and cursed) by thousands of writers. Get an online writing buddy and entire community this month—along with tips, encouragement, and social events—through the NaNoWriMo site.

I will be honest—2020 is not the year for me to attempt NaNoWriMo. I have barely begun a manuscript that I thought would be finished this summer. But the year I did complete the challenge and the years that I didn’t manage to hit even close to the 50,000 by 11/30 were still great experiences. If you decide to begin, let me know and I will happily cheer you on!

Best of luck, everybody!!!

Image courtesy of NaNoWriMo.

And if you need some inspiration, here is a photo of Ursula Le Guin’s writing room.

So let your words spill out of you onto the floor, under the refrigerator and cabinets, and into all parts of the house just as these replacement beans for a beanbag chair so did.

Mix-n-Match Halloween Prompts!

In honor of Halloween, let’s do a Steve Ramirez style prompt: make a list of five monsters or horror movie villains, then a list of five children’s toys, and finally a list of disappointments or tragedies.

Roll dice for each of the categories, or cut them up and put all of a categories options into a hat and draw. Ultimately, see what clicks for you.

For example, perhaps the dice chose Godzilla to explain divorce to the Easy-Bake Oven, but Freddy Krueger just seems more familiar with ovens and furnaces. Go with your gut. Write the poem or short story that calls to you.

For a second prompt, reverse predator and prey: mouse and cat, fly and spider, antelope and tiger, rabbit and hunter…

I took the photograph below in an attempt to capture the face I saw in the stone and moss. Do you see it, or the small figure with outstretched arms that seemed like a thick, misshapen cross from a distance? As a child, I would stare sleepless at the “faces” in the knotty pine walls of my bedroom.

Remember a time when you thought you saw a face in a pattern or shadow, and you had been right. Now write what that figure would have warned you if you had only believed your eyes.

For the final prompt, write a poem or story from the perspective of the “final girl” who makes it to the end of the slasher film but write about your life. You may have to omit 2020 because some storylines just aren’t realistic.

Measure Your “Blueness”—A Prompt for Sad Poets

Hey, poets, finally a technological invention specifically for us: an instrument to measure our “blueness” or our current saturation of sorrow.

Write a poem using the number system below for your current emotional chroma.

Bonus prompt: Write a poem or short story about an instrument that can predict and ultimately modify emotional states.