Writing Prompts Galore

Write something dark, with a reveal as bright as the flank of a white horse

In his nocturnes, Remington depicts moonlight and firelight with dazzling skill against backgrounds of eerie green and blue. Sparingly composed, these works leave the narrative unresolved. About his compositions, Remington said, “Big art is a process of elimination…Cut down and out—do your hardest work outside the picture, and let your audience take away something to think about—to imagine.”

from the Denver Art Museum exhibit

I apologize for the glare at the top of the painting, where in fact there is no such shine. My photo.

In from the Night Herd, 1907

Find below some bits of light, the main story left in the dark, for you to imagine.

Tell the story #1

I was walking around Manual high school, as teachers were handling curbside pickup of laptops and chargers for students who would begin classes online due to the pandemic. The teachers were upbeat, greeted parents happily. The cop who was their school resource officer slouched against his SUV, talking to two teachers as I passed, said, “I’m going to give you some information…” He paused until I was out of earshot, the teachers leaning toward him.

Compare/contrast Birds & Children

Magpies and blue jays have a harder time than most weaning their young—or perhaps they are only much louder about it. On the other hand, I realize early in August that the loud, persistent complaint has largely ended. If only the dependence of grown children were so brief.

Tell the story #2

This happens in pre-pandemic times. We don’t let anyone into our house these days.

Are we expecting someone? Phil calls. I am mid-sentence in a comment on a friend’s blog. No, I reply, coming down the stairs in time to see someone leaving the porch. I peer out. As soon as I recognize her, I know why she’s here. She’s come to tell us her story. We had a good work relationship long ago, although we never became friends outside of work. Years after I left that job, I heard rumors about what happened, how her career ended. On the porch I call her back, give her a hug. Is this a bad time? No, no. Come in. Phil waits at the top of the stairs. Look who it is, I say. Oh, my god, Phil exclaims and starts down the stairs. My husband also understands that we have a story to hear. Once we’re settled in the living room with cups of tea, our guest begins.

Compare/contrast People and Morning Glories

This spring when they reached a few inches, I stuck climbing sticks among them. You don’t have to tell morning glories twice. Within days or even hours, they began to wrap their intelligent, avaricious vines around those twigs and climb. Some people are like that.

Glories ready for their group shot

The oppositional nature of human desire

It is easier to wish you were doing something, to believe with all your heart and mind that you want to write or exercise when you can’t, than it is to actually do those things when you can. If people are sometimes like morning glories, why is this also true?

Tell the story #3

I’m on a bus tour of Paris with the travel group. We walk to a view of Notre Dame and the guide asks if anyone has heard of Shakespeare & Co. which is around the corner from where we stand. I am the only one who raises my hand. These are the people I’ll be on the boat with for 10 days.

A famous English language bookstore in Paris

Write the Op-Ed

It is tempting to believe there is little danger when you and yours are untouched, when deaths happen largely in poor, ethnic neighborhoods, among the elderly, on reservations, in Amazon warehouses and meatpacking plants, in prisons and immigrant detention facilities, among essential workers like janitorial staffs, grocery store clerks, medical emergency personnel, in understaffed nursing homes. It is easy to have no sense of mourning, to not register the loss of those we don’t even know we depend on, the way we have not registered the racial biases of deaths at the hands of police. If there are pluses to this pandemic, revealing our injustices to ourselves is one of them.

Select a quote and write about truth

And they would not believe me, precisely because they would know that what I said was true.                                                                                                                  —James Baldwin

True poetry is truth. Truth is not popular, so poetry also is not. —David Mitchell

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4 Responses to Writing Prompts Galore

  1. Bob Jaeger says:

    I find myself lwondering about the phrase “essential workers.” Are there any who are not essential in modern society’s intricate web? Furthermore, if there are non-essential workers, are there non-essential people? I think not, unless perhaps the one willing to declare another so.

    We humans have always compared and differentiated each other, but it may be that the deep futility of such thought and action is becoming increasingly clear.

    As Doctor William Donkin said, “It takes all sorts. If one sort is missing, you’re one sort short”—hard to remember when the fellow across the alley shoots pop bottle rockets toward my ancient pine tree, but perhaps an essential lesson for me in how to approach him without giving in to the anger setting me on fire.

    Rumi comes to mind: “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right doing there is a field. I’ll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass the world is too full to talk about.”

    Rumi, tugging at the deepest heart and prompting the question, “How do we do this?”

    • dubrava says:

      Just now, Bob Jaeger, I am resisting the urge to unfriend my Florida Trump supporter people, several of whom I know to be decent human beings. But it is hard: how can they still stand behind this racist, cruel person who clearly doesn’t care how many of us die? There must be Rumi’s field somewhere.

  2. Gregg says:

    A girl with a smile full of shiny teeth, in a nightclub, wanted to give me her phone number but I thought I was too old for her. As I carried a small red piano down a spiral staircase, outside, in the snow, I regretted not getting her number.

    This morning, after two cups of coffee, I am still haunted by this dream. I can’t remember her exotic name.

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