Prompts from a friend

More writing prompts sent to me by a writer-friend early in December.

From Naming the World:

1. Write about a secret from the perspective of someone with the below statement:
* I never told anyone.
* I did tell one person. God help me.
* I never told anyone, but I’ll tell you.

2. Try writing about something you do every day and take for granted.

3. Starter: "She didn’t want to go, but..."

4. Choose an object that interests you enough to suggest it could be someone’s centering symbol. Why does it carry a metaphysical force?

5. You found a feather on the ground on the way over. Start talking to a person you know about this feather.

6. Pick a character that you hate and find something you love about them.

7. What is your character's obsession?

8. Destroy something you love.

Sentence and Phrase Prompts from Marge Piercy's Hard Loving:

1. I was a rabbit with twigs for bones.

2. Sometimes an old buffalo man... stares from your face."

3. Succulent as a burst apricot

4. A phosphorescent smear

5. Peeling an orange

Lines of Poetry

Its been forever since I last updated the blog here, so here's a few writing prompts in the form of quotes and poetic lines:

"The moment a little boy is concerned with which is a jay and which is a sparrow, he can no longer see the birds or hear them sing." - Eric Berne, psychiatrist

"I dreamed a knife like a song you can't whistle." - Frank Stanford, "The Singing Knives"

"Which failure cannot cast down nor success make proud." - Robinson Jeffers, "Rock and Hawk"

"...at night he remembers freedom And flies in a dream, the dawns ruin it." - Robinson Jeffers, "Hurt Hawks"

"I'd sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk." - Robinson Jeffers, "Hurt Hawks"

"We are safe to finish what we have to finish." - Robinson Jeffers, "The Bed By The Window"

"Be angry at the sun for setting." - Robinson Jeffers, "Be Angry at the Sun for Setting"

"Stark violence is still the sire of all the world's values." - Robinson Jeffers, "The Bloody Sire"

"Old violence is not too old to beget new values." - Robinson Jeffers, "The Bloody Sire"

"wore down on their wings" - Robinson Jeffers, "Their Beauty Has More Meaning"

Free-writing and Poetry Plans

So I stumbled across an interesting writing prompt online. Write a brief short story which has these three elements in it: a bomb shelter, a fairy tale character, and yourself. This is what I came up with.

After entering what appears to be an empty bomb shelter, the journalist found a large scrap of paper laying on the ground by a tall shelving unit. The shelves were full of books instead of canned food. She thought this was odd, but focused her attention on the writing which covered the scrap paper completely. After a few moments turning the paper around and over again, she found the start of what appeared to be an account of what took place in this bomb shelter.

"We don't have much time, but I am one of the few who can explain on paper what happened to us and maybe one day someone will be able to help us. I am Goldilocks. The year is 1942. There is a war ravaging the world. We all managed to find a shelter large enough for us to safely hide as nuclear bombs are mushrooming everywhere above ground. Soldiers are at the entrance to this shelter threatening to disintegrate the doors and annihilate us. Us being me, the three bears, the billy goat gruffs, Snow White and her seven dwarfs, Cindy and her prince, the last unicorn, the three little pigs and the wolf (he is sedated for now), and many others. I don't have time to name us all, but I hope you will be able to remember us all and bring us back. Where have we gone? Well, Tinkerbell and some of the witches got together and came up with a spell. We're still in this room, but we don't take up as much space. Each book is not only our stories, but ourselves also. Hopefully this spell will work and the soldiers will have not harmed us disguised innocently as books. If the spell did not work, then we will forever be lost. Please, if you are a friend, do what you can to bring us back from these pages. We are always changing and we must live off the page in order to grow with society's ever-changing ideals. Please, we beg you, be our friend."

The journalist stared a few more moments at the scrap of paper wondering what to make of it. The bomb shelter was situated beneath a poet's home, long dead after having published poetry and photography chapbooks most of her life. Considering the nuclear war was long over, the journalist could only imagine that this scrap was a random piece of imagination from the poet. A creative piece not tarnished by mass consumption. After looking at the books, a collection of beautifully illustrated fairy tales, the journalist called for her friend to help her pack the heavy volumes into the car for her own personal library.

In other writing endeavors, I intend to complete the Lexington Lives poems by the end of the summer. I have some research to do in the Lexington Public Library and maybe at UK's library's archives. In order to get another 15 poems out I will have to delve deeper into history of the area. I may have the collection span all years of the 1800s and 1900s. I had set the limit to early 1900s, but then again, there is a poem set post-Vietnam War. When that collection is complete I hope to create a chapbook and publish it.