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?

What We Need—Prompts Inspired by Kym Deyn.

I love this poem—its generosity and perseverance, its imagery and world building. Perhaps this is what I need to say and to hear right now. If you want more poems by Kim Deyn, check out their website.

For the first prompt, build the poem’s opening as descriptions of your friends or family members or lovers. Notice the strong first image with subsequent layering of similes. Choose whomever you would save if you could and would ask they do the same for you. Be careful not to copy the original’s syntax and imagery too closely, and credit the poet for your inspiration.

For the second prompt, use the line “Who am I to fling open the curtains?” for a ghostline, using it as the starting point and then erasing it. Again, give credit to the poet or perhaps include “ghostline from Kym Deyn” in your title.

For a third prompt, reverse the original poem’s order, beginning with an image of the rescue—from a burning building, a flood, some disaster, or mythological horror—and adding one person or group of people you would save. How many can you bring with you into light and safety?

The next prompt is another ghostline, this time using “What use am I against your own sadnesses” to jump off from. For this poem, play around with who the “I” and the “you” are.

Bonus prompt: write an ekphrastic using this mural from Twin Falls, Idaho. Where does the woman here lead you?

Copy Your Heroes—Prompts for Writing Practice and Parody

The process and practice of writing are more important than creating a poem to publish. If you are blocked and just need to practice, choose a poem you love and write your own version of it. This can be a serious attempt or a parody version. Either way what you create is likely too similar to the original to publish.

I know I have done this prompt before (with “This is Just to Say” by William Carlos Williams), but this next one is based on Laura Gilpin’s “The Two-Headed Calf” from her collection The Hocus-Pocus of the Universe.

I love Todd Dillard’s take on Gilpin’s poem.

For your first prompt, take the structure of Gilpin’s poem and replace the calf with another animal. Who would find the creature and where? How would the world appear to this creature, and how would the world respond to it?

For the next prompt, choose a poem that resonates with you. Adapt it to your perspective. How does your poem differ from the original? What can you characterize about your own “voice” or style?

Bonus prompt: write a poem that for the model and its data or simply an ode to the creature.

Escape Artist—Prompts

Here are more short horror prompts brought to you by doomscrolling on Twitter.

The first prompt is to write a text conversation between someone trying escape the forest and another trying to escape the maze.

The second prompt is to write an instructional poem on getting yourself out of a haunted forest or twisted maze but indicate in the title that this set of instructions is how to escape a bad marriage or relationship.

For an unrelated prompt, write a poem using the same prompt I was given years ago: lab rat, the apocalypse, and disrupted gas lines (thanks, Steve Ramirez). I was happy with the poem I got with this prompt.

Feed Your Skeletons, Vampires, and Ghouls—Prompts

For your first prompt, write a poem about feeding a monster (or monsters). Be as conscientious as @mctreeleth is by providing skeletons with calcium and avoiding curses from pottery shards. Or if you are feeding a vampire, be thorough: does your vampire need a particular blood type or prefer to use a Capri straw to drink?

For a second prompt, write a list of five innocent hobbies, such as birdwatching or coin collecting, and make a second list of monsters and mythical creatures. Look at the two lists and see what connects for you. Write a poem using one item from each list.

For the last prompt, write a poem using the photo below to describe what happens next.

Good luck writing! Have fun with your monsters!

Spooky Prompts for Lovers

Let the season of ghouls and ghosts bring light to your carved pumpkin heart.

For your first prompt make a list of monsters, mythological creatures, and horror villains on a sheet of paper. Write down at least five but the more the merrier! Now cut each of those items into separate strip of paper. Fold each strip and place into a hat or trick-or-treat basket. Choose two and write a love poem about these two. If those don’t spark any inspiration, choose again.

For your second prompt, take two common enemies—perhaps a comic book hero and nemesis—and ship them. Make their story arc from jilted longing and resentment to white picket fence or at least a fabulous one night.

The inspiration for your next prompt is this movie poster (from an exhibit at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA)

Your final prompt is to write an ekphrastic using the following movie poster from the Peabody Essex.

Have fun!

More October—Spooky Season—Prompts

More weeks of poor productivity—hence the delay—but let’s have some fun. It is a month of spookiness!

For your first prompt, release some long-held resentment and throw a curse. Name your target and make your curse personal and specific. Be cruel if necessary: “may your chapstick melt in your purse and all toothpaste taste of rotting fish.”

For your next prompt, write a poem as if it were a spell to bring you back from death. What would draw you from eternal peace? What scents and tastes or textures attract you? Or include what you believe represents your sense of self.

Your third prompt is to write from the pissed-off persona of this tree. Or at least that’s what I thought as it seemed to stare back at me. I may have been dehydrated at the time though.

For your fourth prompt, write about one of your fears. It doesn’t have to be a poem, but it does need to be detailed description or event, more than just a few lines. (And more than just “spiders” as I might say.) Then make an erasure from what you’ve written. What do you choose to mark out or erase? What do you make out of a fear that you—on paper at least—have lost or marked off?

And for your final prompt, write a poem using a common horror trope, such as writing from the persona of a slasher film’s final girl. If that shorter list didn’t help you, check out the site for tropes and be sucked in. Muhahahahahahahaha!

Good luck! Have fun!

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!

Autumn Gathering—No sad prompts, I promise

So let’s celebrate the season for its gathering, rather than its ending of summer. Let’s write how beautiful the crisp air is—the evening bite of wind into apple cheeks—the blaze of reds and golds that can warm the day as cupping a mug hot cider will for chilled hands, how wheat glints in the fields, ready for its transformation into bread and communion.

I am grateful for Tom Snarky for sharing this poem by Linda Pastan (and to Todd Dillard for his thread on celebrating poets of autumn). Gorgeous!

For the first prompt, begin with the image that immediately comes to mind with autumn. What do you picture? Is it the omnipresent pumpkin, the bizarrely twisted and bumpy gourd, pumpkin spice lattes and maple bars? Is it a maple tree in full blaze? Is it heavy-headed mums teaching other flowers what real voluptuousness can bring to the yard? Is it pumpkin pie with nutmeg and cinnamon tingling on your tongue? Celebrate the season.

If it helps, start with the lines “I want to celebrate / color” for a ghostline. Be sure to erase the line and credit the poet for your inspiration.

The middle of the poem declares, “Look at the pumpkins, / it’s finally autumn!” Follow that instruction and look and describe the multitude of shapes and colors, the cornucopia of richness in pumpkins and gourds, apples and pomegranates, cranberries and carrots. Make a poem obscene in its autumn sweetness.

For the last prompt, write a list poem of all the joys and celebrations the year has brought you. Be specific. Let us hear your cat’s purring, feel a child’s small hand taking yours as you cross a street, curl into a flannel on chilly night while a campfire crackles and hisses.

Reverse time—Prompts

I am grateful to Gabrielle Bates for sharing this poem by Matt Rasmussen. It took my breath.

For the first prompt, reverse an event in your life—note, the event doesn’t have to be a tragedy. Although tragedy—and regret—lends itself particularly well to this device, something smaller and lighter would also be effective. Perhaps write about the first kiss you received from your current lover. You may find it easier to write in the usual time order first.

For the second prompt, use the line “The unsuffering ends” as a ghostline. What happens next? Make sure to delete the line and credit the poet with your inspiration.

For a third prompt, take a narrative poem you have already written and reorder starting from the bottom. What works and what doesn’t? Do you like the reordering better?

Although Teresa Leo’s “After Twelve Months, Someone Tells Me It’s Time to Join the Living” isn’t in a reverse order, it plays with time so beautifully.

Follow This—Prompts for Misunderstandings

We’ve all been there—in a bar or crowded restaurant and misheard someone’s comment. You think to yourself, “Why is he asking about whales?” only to realize later the topic is ales. Or perhaps that happens mostly to me. God knows what I’ve agreed to when I just smile and nod to a question I’ve already asked to be repeated.

Or we’ve attached the particleboard side front facing rather than in the back when putting together an IKEA shelf (well, I usually do).

These next prompts are about misunderstanding directions or comments.

Of course you can write a sestina if you wish, or you can imagine trying to follow these directions after they were yelled to you in a crowd and break the form in interesting ways.

For a second prompt, take these directions or another set of directions, and replace one word with another object or image. What would happen if you replaced “stanzas” with “decades” and “line/lines” to “loss/losses”? The inspiration for this exercise comes from HanaLena Fennel who has an amazing poem that does this in her collection Letters to the Leader.

For a third prompt, write the instruction manual for your life. How do you build your years? How do you adhere your memories, sort the people you’ve turned to, fasten the houses you’ve lived in and left?

If you need a freewriting exercise to get going, try writing the instruction manual for this escape route.

Have fun writing!

Gothic Your Town—Prompts

If you are as tired of writing different versions of the same depressing poem in various forms as I am, explore a new genre. Maybe combine the aesthetics of a fiction genre into a poem. I love this thread of tweets that combines gothic tone and Minneapolis. And it is true: 35W is always under construction.

Raised in the Midwest, I FEEL this to the marrow of my corn-fed bones:

For your first prompt, describe your hometown or current town using the tropes of a fiction genre— gothic, horror, whatever fits best. Try writing it as a prose poem, and then try a version with stanzas and line breaks. What happens? Which works better and why?

For another challenge, try to write a prose poem in which one sentence or phrase is repeated at least three times with the purpose of building tension. If you are having difficulty, make a list of five common sayings in your area. Which of the five stands out. Begin with that statement and create a chorus effect.

Here are two more examples of the writer doing this so well:

For a third prompt, describe Main Street, or the most famous street in your city, in one sentence. Begin with that image but focus tighter and tighter until you end up with a single image of a broken bottle, dead bird along the curb, or some other stark image. See what happens.

Here is a photo from my favorite restaurant in Minneapolis. Perhaps it will put you in the mood.

And birds. We must have birds for gothic.

Yes, birds.

That is your final prompt.

Good luck writing!

Sealey Challenge—with Prompts

So at least I am reading more than previous, but definitely not every day. How are you all doing on the challenge? I hope better than I have!

Even though I haven’t read as much as intended, I at least have read excellent books. Kelly Gray’s Instructions for an Animal Body is wonderful, filling my head with dripping moss, the shadows of wings, and transformation. I particularly loved “The Fox as Form.” Another of the poems from the collection, “When the Shooter Comes: Instructions for My Daughter,” was used as inspiration for the workshop I attend. It is powerful.

It was of course difficult to choose just one poem, and I realize now that “The Season of Motherhood” is a little less surreal and dark than most in the book, but I am missing my daughter, so this one called to me.

For the first prompt, describe two people in relationship antonyms—perhaps of seasons as shown here. Notice how the daughter is “Spring,” movement, sky, and brightness whereas the narrator describes herself as “Winter,” “stillness,” and earth. Binary oppositions have long been used in poetry, but focus on where the opposites meet and what pulls them together.

For the next prompt use the line “We intersect where the long grass is ice flat” as a ghostline. Go from there. Remember to erase the line and credit the poet for your inspiration.

The last prompt is a Mad Libs writing exercise. Take the poem’s structure but replace all of the nouns and action verbs with your own. See what happens. Perhaps a line you’ve recreated will inspire a poem of your own.

Good luck reading and writing!

Sealey Challenge Update—with Prompts

Although I had read Anna Ross’s Figuring last week (and have had it on my to-read shelf for years) and really enjoyed it, I am only now posting. Last week was a rough one.

The poems in this chapbook are titled in variations of “Self-Portrait” or “Report” and interweave themes of motherhood and nature and the brutality in each.

Although it was difficult to choose just one poem, I love the juxtaposition of the mundane and the surreal in “Self-Portrait with Catastrophe.”

For the first prompt, write a list poem of grocery items paired with abstractions. Like the “sour milk for memory,” give the abstract a taste and smell. What do you need? What won’t you be able to find? How much are you willing to pay?

For the second prompt, use the line “People are fleeing the aisle of unsent letters” for a ghostline. See what happens. After you’ve finished, remember to erase the line and credit the poet for your inspiration.

For the last prompt, write your own poem with the title of “Self-Portrait as Catastrophe” and again make sure to credit Ross.

Good luck writing and reading!

Sealey Challenge Update—And Prompts

I had heard Kathryn de Lancellotti read many of these poems at her book launch and immediately ordered the book—but had misplaced the entire shipment. I heartily recommend this book to everyone. You can purchase from the publisher here (full disclosure: many of my friends are involved with Moon Tide Press, and I have had poems published in its anthologies).

It was incredibly difficult to choose which poem to select for prompts, but I could not resist the beautiful language and imagery of “These Walls.”

For the first prompt, take the line “I would have never seen if not for the” and fill in your own image to use as a first line. See where you go from there.

For the second prompt, write a poem about advice you were given and what you did instead.

For the last prompt, begin a list of every medicine, self-medication, escapism or addition you’ve tried and where you are now.

Good luck writing and reading!

Sealey Challenge Update—with Prompts

I again finished a chapbook that has been in an unread pile for years—this time Kim Bridgford’s Doll, which uses traditional forms such sonnets and villanelles to explore society’s expectations of women.

Although I believe the submission window is closed now, you can subscribe to Duotrope to find out more about the the Kim Bridgford Memorial Sonnet Contest (I do not have a membership since I do not submit often enough to justify the expense, but you should try to submit more than I—everyone should).

My favorite poem in the collection is “Barbie Turns Fifty-Three,” perhaps because I can sympathize with an aging Barbie whose feet do not easily fit into heels (if ever mine did) and whose hopes for a future have turned to rearview mirror regrets.

For the first prompt, give a doll or action figure an age and use both the toy’s name and the age (e.g. “Tenderheart Bear Turns 37”) for your as Bridgford did. You will probably want to state “after Kim Bridgford” below the title. Try to write a sonnet if possible.

For the next prompt, use the line “And what is this new sorrow, and this ache?” for a ghostline. Remember to erase the line and credit the poet.

For the final prompt, write a poem about whom you believe the world is designed for. Examine the ways you are not that person.

Good luck and good reading!

Sealey Challenge Update—with Prompts

So this month has not gone as planned. I have finished only two books so far, but the month isn’t over.

Beneath the Ice Fish Like Souls Look Alike by Emilia Phillips is a book I’ve had for a long time (in that stack of unread books), and the whole structure and intertwined connections are fascinating.

As you can see below, there is no title. Each page consists of a few lines, and the objects are treated as characters, holding agency and often reappear throughout. For example, a metal chair “shrinks further / into itself” and later “offers a seat to the shadow.”

For the first prompt, make a list of five objects and a second list of five actions/emotions. See what connections you can make between the lists. Or cut each list into single items and place items from each list into separate hats, drawing randomly.

Push yourself to create characters out of a single object or challenge yourself to use all five objects in one poem or a poem divided into sections. See what happens.

For the next prompt, use the first lines, “In the abandoned / house, the floorboards crowd / like teeth” as a ghostline. Remember to erase the line and credit the poet for your inspiration.

For the last prompt—again simply a writing exercise—take these lines and Mad Lib them, replacing the nouns and verbs with your own. Then if something sparks for you, take one of these recreated lines and use that for either your first line or your last.

Have fun reading and writing!

Sealey Challenge Update!—and Prompts

I am back in California from Mississippi. Obviously behind on the challenge, I did finish my first book: Terri Niccum’s The Knife Thrower’s Daughter published by Moon Tide Press. Terri is in the same workshop I’m in, and I enjoy the generosity of her perspective demonstrated in her comments there and in the worlds she creates in her poems.

One of my favorite poems in the book is “What She Told the River.” I love the imagery and the sound of the language.

For the first prompt, address an aspect of nature in a series of requests: the ocean, a stone within a river’s current, a tree clinging to a cliff side, a half-blown dandelion. Make a list of possible objects—living or not—and create a second list of qualities: resiliency, longevity, belonging, etc. Mix and match the answers. Or take one object/phenomenon and write a poem requesting a particular quality you wish to embody as it does.

For a second prompt, use the line “Make my journey a wet undoing” as a ghostline and go from there. Remember to erase the line and credit Terri with the inspiration.

For a writing exercise prompt, take the poem and use antonyms for the nouns and/or verbs. See what happens. Because the structure will be too similar to the original, this is just a writing exercise.

Have fun reading and writing this month!

I Am in This Photo, and I Do Not Like It—Prompts

So tomorrow begins the Sealey Challenge, and I am behind on my reading. A few weeks ago I gave in and just organized my unread books on the bookshelves rather than stacking them into leaning towers as a to-read reminder. I do not need to call myself out like that when there exist plenty of callouts already—as in the meme below.

So that meme really hit home since I had planned to have my manuscript completed two years ago and even finished a manuscript workshop.

If you were likewise targeted by that meme, write a list poem of all the tasks you have finished instead of your manuscript. Make your list as trivial or as surreal as you wish.

For the next prompt, find a meme that made you simultaneously laugh and bow your head in shame and write an ekphrastic poem.

The third prompt is to use “Why violence why” for a ghostline or as an epigraph. Be sure to credit Lysz Flo.

For a final prompt, find an unflattering picture of yourself that you wished didn’t exist and write a praise poem to that former self. Be kind.

Bonus prompt: what did you say to make the fish react this way?

Sealey Challenge Coming Soon!

I have been struggling to keep up with reading. My stack of unread books far outpaces my stack of read. I hope this August I can rekindle my reading habits. Just as with the last couple of years of not completing the 30/30 writing challenge but writing more poems than usual, I know that simply trying to participate will encourage me to read more poetry.

For more information on the challenge and how to connect with other readers and get great book recommendations, check out the website.

I hope you can join me, but if not, no worries. We are all in this together!