Welcome to The Cabin's Drop-In Workshop Online
The Cabin’s mission to inspire a love of writing comes alive with a writing workshop held 6:30-8:00 PM on the first Monday of each month. Free sessions are held at The Cabin’s historic building next to the Boise Public Library. BUT, if you can't get to the Cabin, you can still enjoy the lessons and ideas that teaching-writer Adrian Kien provides. Each month, we will publish his lesson plan on this website in the space below.
Adrian Kien, holds an MFA in creative writing from Boise State University and currently teaches poetry and composition there as well. He also is a Writer-in-Residence with The Cabin’s popular Writers in the Schools (WITS) Program. Most recently, he is the author of The Caress is a Letter of Instruction (soon to be released by Slope Editions) and Look Up, a collaborative book of poetry and drawings by Kelly Packer. His writing can also be found at Hoboeye Online Arts Journal, Action Yes, 1913 Journal, Cycling’s Greatest Misadventures, and he has an eBook published with BlazeVOX.
Adrian Kien, holds an MFA in creative writing from Boise State University and currently teaches poetry and composition there as well. He also is a Writer-in-Residence with The Cabin’s popular Writers in the Schools (WITS) Program. Most recently, he is the author of The Caress is a Letter of Instruction (soon to be released by Slope Editions) and Look Up, a collaborative book of poetry and drawings by Kelly Packer. His writing can also be found at Hoboeye Online Arts Journal, Action Yes, 1913 Journal, Cycling’s Greatest Misadventures, and he has an eBook published with BlazeVOX.
Drop-In Lesson Plan April 2013
Warm-Up
To get our minds limbered-up this month we’re going to look at some abstract art. The source of this art is easy. Without lifting up your pen, draw a few looping squiggles across your page. Now lift up your pen and draw a line through the looping squiggles. Now place two dots somewhere on your page. Voila: You have some abstract art. On a separate sheet of paper, write the word “Suppose” five to ten times down the side. For each sentence, think of a new scenario or image that might be taking place in the drawing.
Examples
Suppose it is a bear sipping a milkshake.
Suppose the sky crackles and we all go running into an outhouse for shelter.
Suppose the man was carrying a bullwhip.
Suppose it was Tuesday and the forsythia bushes were igniting.
Activity 1: Abandon and Return
SCARY, NO SCARY by Zachary Schomburg
One night, when
you return to your childhood
home after
a lifetime away,
you'll find it
abandoned. Its
paint will be
completely weathered.
It will have
a significant westward lean.
There will be
a hole in its roof
that bats fly
out of.
The old man
hunched over
at the front door
will be prepared
to give you a tour,
but first he'll ask
Scary, or no scary?
You should say
No scary.
This poem has a haunting quality. The details of the abandoned house seem familiar to anyone who has passed places like this on lonely highways. You imagine the lives of the people who lived in this place. Was life better then? The speaker of the poem tells us we should say, “No scary.” What happens if we say, “Scary?” Write about what happens as you enter into this childhood home? Imagine you are suddenly in your middle school body again, describe your house. Or, if you have your own memories of entering an abandoned house like this one, write about it. Try to capture as many details as you can.
Activity 2: Places Becoming Stories
Excerpt from The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros:
The house on Mango Street is not the way they told it at all. It’s small and red with tight steps in front and windows so small you’d think they were holding their breath. Bricks are crumbling in places, and the front door is so swollen you have to push hard to get in. There is no front yard, only four little elms the city planted by the curb. Out back is a small garage for the car we don’t own yet and a small yard that looks smaller between the two buildings on either side. There are stairs in our house but they’re ordinary hallway stairs, and the house has only one washroom. Everybody has to share a bedroom—Mama and Papa, Carlos and Kiki, me and Nenny.
Excerpt from One Writer’s Beginnings by Eudora Welty:
In our house on North Congress Street in Jackson, Mississippi, where I was born in 1909, we grew up to the striking of clocks. There was a mission-style oak grandfather clock standing in the hall, which sent its gong-like strokes through the living room, dining room, kitchen, pantry, and up the sounding board stairwell. Through the night, it could find its way into our ears; sometimes even on the sleeping porch, midnight could wake us. My parents’ bedroom had a smaller striking clock that answered it.
Excerpt from “The Rockpile” by James Baldwin:
Across the street from their house, in an empty lot between two houses, stood the rockpile. It was a strange place to find a mass of natural rock jutting out of the ground; and someone, probably Aunt Florence, had once told them that the rock was there and could not be taken away because without it the subway cars underground would fly apart. This was far too intriguing an explanation to be challenged, and it invested the rockpile with such mysterious importance that Roy felt it to be his right to play there…. Other boys were seen there each afternoon after school and all day Saturday and Sunday. They fought on the rockpile. Sure footed, dangerous, and reckless, they rushed each other and grappled on the heights, sometimes disappearing down the other side in a confusion of dust and screams and flying feet….
“It’s a wonder they don’t kill themselves,” their mother said. “You children stay away from there, do you hear me?”
But one Saturday, Roy was wounded on the rockpile and brought upstairs screaming.
Your Turn
Imagine a place where a story might take place. It can be real or imagined.
1. Where is the place? Ex. On the other side of the Boise Mountains. Beside the lake.
2. What can you see there? (List three or four things. Think about close things and distant things.)
3. What sounds might you hear in this place? (List three or four.)
4. What animals or people are in this place? What are they doing?
6. How did you end up in this place?
7. What possible narratives might develop here? (List a couple ideas.)
Using these notes, write a story that first describes a place and then moves into a narrative that is dependent on the conditions of the place.
To get our minds limbered-up this month we’re going to look at some abstract art. The source of this art is easy. Without lifting up your pen, draw a few looping squiggles across your page. Now lift up your pen and draw a line through the looping squiggles. Now place two dots somewhere on your page. Voila: You have some abstract art. On a separate sheet of paper, write the word “Suppose” five to ten times down the side. For each sentence, think of a new scenario or image that might be taking place in the drawing.
Examples
Suppose it is a bear sipping a milkshake.
Suppose the sky crackles and we all go running into an outhouse for shelter.
Suppose the man was carrying a bullwhip.
Suppose it was Tuesday and the forsythia bushes were igniting.
Activity 1: Abandon and Return
SCARY, NO SCARY by Zachary Schomburg
One night, when
you return to your childhood
home after
a lifetime away,
you'll find it
abandoned. Its
paint will be
completely weathered.
It will have
a significant westward lean.
There will be
a hole in its roof
that bats fly
out of.
The old man
hunched over
at the front door
will be prepared
to give you a tour,
but first he'll ask
Scary, or no scary?
You should say
No scary.
This poem has a haunting quality. The details of the abandoned house seem familiar to anyone who has passed places like this on lonely highways. You imagine the lives of the people who lived in this place. Was life better then? The speaker of the poem tells us we should say, “No scary.” What happens if we say, “Scary?” Write about what happens as you enter into this childhood home? Imagine you are suddenly in your middle school body again, describe your house. Or, if you have your own memories of entering an abandoned house like this one, write about it. Try to capture as many details as you can.
Activity 2: Places Becoming Stories
Excerpt from The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros:
The house on Mango Street is not the way they told it at all. It’s small and red with tight steps in front and windows so small you’d think they were holding their breath. Bricks are crumbling in places, and the front door is so swollen you have to push hard to get in. There is no front yard, only four little elms the city planted by the curb. Out back is a small garage for the car we don’t own yet and a small yard that looks smaller between the two buildings on either side. There are stairs in our house but they’re ordinary hallway stairs, and the house has only one washroom. Everybody has to share a bedroom—Mama and Papa, Carlos and Kiki, me and Nenny.
Excerpt from One Writer’s Beginnings by Eudora Welty:
In our house on North Congress Street in Jackson, Mississippi, where I was born in 1909, we grew up to the striking of clocks. There was a mission-style oak grandfather clock standing in the hall, which sent its gong-like strokes through the living room, dining room, kitchen, pantry, and up the sounding board stairwell. Through the night, it could find its way into our ears; sometimes even on the sleeping porch, midnight could wake us. My parents’ bedroom had a smaller striking clock that answered it.
Excerpt from “The Rockpile” by James Baldwin:
Across the street from their house, in an empty lot between two houses, stood the rockpile. It was a strange place to find a mass of natural rock jutting out of the ground; and someone, probably Aunt Florence, had once told them that the rock was there and could not be taken away because without it the subway cars underground would fly apart. This was far too intriguing an explanation to be challenged, and it invested the rockpile with such mysterious importance that Roy felt it to be his right to play there…. Other boys were seen there each afternoon after school and all day Saturday and Sunday. They fought on the rockpile. Sure footed, dangerous, and reckless, they rushed each other and grappled on the heights, sometimes disappearing down the other side in a confusion of dust and screams and flying feet….
“It’s a wonder they don’t kill themselves,” their mother said. “You children stay away from there, do you hear me?”
But one Saturday, Roy was wounded on the rockpile and brought upstairs screaming.
Your Turn
Imagine a place where a story might take place. It can be real or imagined.
1. Where is the place? Ex. On the other side of the Boise Mountains. Beside the lake.
2. What can you see there? (List three or four things. Think about close things and distant things.)
3. What sounds might you hear in this place? (List three or four.)
4. What animals or people are in this place? What are they doing?
6. How did you end up in this place?
7. What possible narratives might develop here? (List a couple ideas.)
Using these notes, write a story that first describes a place and then moves into a narrative that is dependent on the conditions of the place.
Drop-In Lesson Plan, March 2013
Warm-Up
The ABC poem. List the alphabet on the side of your page. Put your name where your letter is. Write a poem that is one long crazy sentence that includes your name. You are allowed 1 to 2 words per line. Try a reverse ABC poem, a ZYX poem.
Activity 1: Writing Instructions
Both of these examples are by Julio Cortázar From "Stories of Cronopios and Famas", P. Blackburn's translation
INSTRUCTIONS TO SING
"Begin by breaking all the mirrors in the house, let your arms fall to your side, gaze vacantly at the wall, forget yourself. Sing one single note, listen to it from inside. If you hear (but this will happen much later) something like a landscape overwhelmed with dread, bonfires, between the rocks with squatting half-naked silhouettes, I think you'll be well on your way, and the same if you hear a river, boats painted yellow and black are coming down it, if you hear the smell of fresh bread, the shadow of a horse.
Afterwards, buy a manual of voice instruction and a dress jacket, and please, don't sing through your nose and leave poor Schumann at peace."
INSTRUCTIONS ON HOW TO CRY
"Putting the reasons for crying aside for the moment, we might concentrate on the correct way to cry, which, be it understood, means a weeping that doesn’t turn into a big commotion nor proves an affront to the smile with its parallel and dull similarity. The average, everyday weeping consists of a general contraction of the face and a spasmodic sound accompanied by tears and mucus, this last toward the end, since the cry ends at the point when one energetically blows one’s nose.
In order to cry, steer the imagination toward yourself, and it this proves impossible owing to having contacted the habit of believing in the exterior world, think of a duck covered with ants or of those gulfs in the Strait of Magellan into which no one sails ever.
Coming to the weeping itself, cover the face decorously, using both hands, palms inward. Children are to cry with the sleeve of the dress or shirt pressed against the face, preferably in a corner of the room. Average duration of the cry, three minutes."
INSTRUCTIONS: YOUR TURN
Write instructions on how to do something that normally wouldn’t require instructions, like how to breathe or how to put on a belt. As you write the instructions give yourself license to include details that imply a larger story. In what situation would someone need instructions on how to breathe? Perhaps a moment of great torment or sadness. Where would this situation be? What things would you have to forget in order to just breathe?
Activity 2:Arrival Diaries
Diaries are wonderful spaces where you get to really observe and think about yourself and your surroundings without the pressure of an editor over your shoulder. They are places of great freedom and comfort. However, too often, we take that freedom for granted and end up writing lazy entries about the very basics of we did or ate. When we do this, we lose a personal connection to our former selves because our memories are only capable of doing so much. We have to write it down to know what we were experiencing. In fact, some would argue that when we write it down, we are creating experience.
EXAMPLE: AUGUST, 11 1914 BY ANAIS NIN
"We were all dressed and on deck. It was 2 o’clock and one could vaguely see a city, but very far away.The sea was gray and heavy. How different from the beautiful sea of Spain! I was anxious to arrive, but I was sad. I felt a chill around my heart and I was seeing things all wrong. Suddenly we were wrapped in a thick fog, a torrential rain began to fall, thunder rumbled; lightning flashes lit the heavy black sky. None of the Spanish passengers had ever seen weather like that, so the frightened women wept and the men prayed in low tones. We were not afraid. Maman had seen many other storms and her calmness reassured us. We were the first to go back up on the wet deck. But the fog continued and we waited. It was 4 o’clock when the ship began to move again, slowly as though she approached the great city with fear. Now, leaning on the railing, I couldn’t hear anything. My eyes were fixed on the light that drew closer. I saw the tall buildings. I heard the whistling of the engine. I saw a great deal of movement. Huge buildings went by in front of me. I hated those buildings in advance because they hid what I loved most- flowers, birds, fields."
DIARIES: YOUR TURN
Write a journal entry about arriving somewhere. Think back to significant moments in your life where you were about to arrive somewhere different or somewhere very familiar that you had been away from. If you can’t think of anything, make up a story. Imagine your grandparents coming to America for the first time or arriving in Idaho. What must it have been like? Write this.
The ABC poem. List the alphabet on the side of your page. Put your name where your letter is. Write a poem that is one long crazy sentence that includes your name. You are allowed 1 to 2 words per line. Try a reverse ABC poem, a ZYX poem.
Activity 1: Writing Instructions
Both of these examples are by Julio Cortázar From "Stories of Cronopios and Famas", P. Blackburn's translation
INSTRUCTIONS TO SING
"Begin by breaking all the mirrors in the house, let your arms fall to your side, gaze vacantly at the wall, forget yourself. Sing one single note, listen to it from inside. If you hear (but this will happen much later) something like a landscape overwhelmed with dread, bonfires, between the rocks with squatting half-naked silhouettes, I think you'll be well on your way, and the same if you hear a river, boats painted yellow and black are coming down it, if you hear the smell of fresh bread, the shadow of a horse.
Afterwards, buy a manual of voice instruction and a dress jacket, and please, don't sing through your nose and leave poor Schumann at peace."
INSTRUCTIONS ON HOW TO CRY
"Putting the reasons for crying aside for the moment, we might concentrate on the correct way to cry, which, be it understood, means a weeping that doesn’t turn into a big commotion nor proves an affront to the smile with its parallel and dull similarity. The average, everyday weeping consists of a general contraction of the face and a spasmodic sound accompanied by tears and mucus, this last toward the end, since the cry ends at the point when one energetically blows one’s nose.
In order to cry, steer the imagination toward yourself, and it this proves impossible owing to having contacted the habit of believing in the exterior world, think of a duck covered with ants or of those gulfs in the Strait of Magellan into which no one sails ever.
Coming to the weeping itself, cover the face decorously, using both hands, palms inward. Children are to cry with the sleeve of the dress or shirt pressed against the face, preferably in a corner of the room. Average duration of the cry, three minutes."
INSTRUCTIONS: YOUR TURN
Write instructions on how to do something that normally wouldn’t require instructions, like how to breathe or how to put on a belt. As you write the instructions give yourself license to include details that imply a larger story. In what situation would someone need instructions on how to breathe? Perhaps a moment of great torment or sadness. Where would this situation be? What things would you have to forget in order to just breathe?
Activity 2:Arrival Diaries
Diaries are wonderful spaces where you get to really observe and think about yourself and your surroundings without the pressure of an editor over your shoulder. They are places of great freedom and comfort. However, too often, we take that freedom for granted and end up writing lazy entries about the very basics of we did or ate. When we do this, we lose a personal connection to our former selves because our memories are only capable of doing so much. We have to write it down to know what we were experiencing. In fact, some would argue that when we write it down, we are creating experience.
EXAMPLE: AUGUST, 11 1914 BY ANAIS NIN
"We were all dressed and on deck. It was 2 o’clock and one could vaguely see a city, but very far away.The sea was gray and heavy. How different from the beautiful sea of Spain! I was anxious to arrive, but I was sad. I felt a chill around my heart and I was seeing things all wrong. Suddenly we were wrapped in a thick fog, a torrential rain began to fall, thunder rumbled; lightning flashes lit the heavy black sky. None of the Spanish passengers had ever seen weather like that, so the frightened women wept and the men prayed in low tones. We were not afraid. Maman had seen many other storms and her calmness reassured us. We were the first to go back up on the wet deck. But the fog continued and we waited. It was 4 o’clock when the ship began to move again, slowly as though she approached the great city with fear. Now, leaning on the railing, I couldn’t hear anything. My eyes were fixed on the light that drew closer. I saw the tall buildings. I heard the whistling of the engine. I saw a great deal of movement. Huge buildings went by in front of me. I hated those buildings in advance because they hid what I loved most- flowers, birds, fields."
DIARIES: YOUR TURN
Write a journal entry about arriving somewhere. Think back to significant moments in your life where you were about to arrive somewhere different or somewhere very familiar that you had been away from. If you can’t think of anything, make up a story. Imagine your grandparents coming to America for the first time or arriving in Idaho. What must it have been like? Write this.
Drop-In Lesson Plan, February 2013
Similes Warm-Up List Poem
Read this excellent poem by Michael Ondaatje and then write your own list poem that describes something from as many different perspectives and senses as possible. Really push yourself beyond the normal/clichéd ways of thinking about a sound or a couch or someone’s face.
Sweet Like a Crow
Michael Ondaatje for Hetti Corea, 8 years old
The Sinhalese are beyond a doubt one of the least musical people in the world.
It would be quite impossible to have less sense of pitch, line or rhythm. - Paul Bowles
Your voice sounds like a scorpion being pushed
through a glass tube
like someone has just trod on a peacock
like wind howling in a coconut
like a rusty bible, like someone pulling barbed wire
across a stone courtyard, like a pig drowning,
a vattacka being fried
a bone shaking hands
a frog singing at Carnegie Hall.
Like a crow swimming in milk,
like a nose being hit by a mango
like the crowd at the Royal-Thomian match,
a womb full of twins, a pariah dog
with a magpie in its mouth
like the midnight jet from Casablanca
like Air Pakistan curry,
a typewriter on fire, like a hundred
pappadans being crunched, like someone
trying to light matches in a dark room,
the clicking sound of a reef when you put your head into the sea,
a dolphin reciting epic poetry to a sleepy audience,
the sound of a fan when someone throws brinjals at it,
like pineapples being sliced in the Pettah market
like betel juice hitting a butterfly in mid-air
like a whole village running naked onto the street
and tearing their sarongs, like an angry family
pushing a jeep out of the mud, like dirt on the needle,
like 8 sharks being carried on the back of a bicycle
like 3 old ladies locked in the lavatory
like the sound I heard when having an afternoon sleep
and someone walked through my room in ankle bracelets.
Poem/Memoir
Your Mother’s Kitchen – adapted from Rita Dove
Write a poem or a paragraph about your childhood kitchen. Put the oven in it, and also something green, and something dead. You should also decide what day of the week it is. A kitchen is significantly different on Monday morning and Sunday morning. In this poem you are not present, but some female relation—aunt, sister, close friend—must walk into the kitchen during the course of the poem.
Kitchenette Building
Gwendolyn Brooks
We are things of dry hours and the involuntary plan,
Grayed in, and gray. “Dream” makes a giddy sound, not strong
Like “rent,” “feeding a wife,” “satisfying a man.”
But could a dream send up through onion fumes
Its white and violet, fight with fried potatoes
And yesterday’s garbage ripening in the hall,
Flutter, or sing an aria down these rooms
Even if we were willing to let it in,
Had time to warm it, keep it very clean,
Anticipate a message, let it begin?
We wonder. But not well! not for a minute!
Since Number Five is out of the bathroom now,
We think of lukewarm water, hope to get in it.
Fiction
Character Bios – adapted from Amanda Bennett. This writing prompt requires blank paper and some friends.
I.
On a sheet of paper:
1. List 5 character names.
2. List character bio criteria. (Don’t fill in the details, you are just creating
the prompts.)
Pass your paper to a partner.
II.
When you receive your list of 5 names and bio criteria, pick one of the 5 names and then fill in the bio information.
Pass your paper to a third person.
III.
When you receive your completed bio sketch, look it over and decide what stories could be developed from the bio you have before you. Start writing a story about your character. You don’t need to work in all of the backstory in the first paragraph of your story; you just need to know intimately about your character. The point is to have a good sense of who your character is so that the story seems genuine to them.
Read this excellent poem by Michael Ondaatje and then write your own list poem that describes something from as many different perspectives and senses as possible. Really push yourself beyond the normal/clichéd ways of thinking about a sound or a couch or someone’s face.
Sweet Like a Crow
Michael Ondaatje for Hetti Corea, 8 years old
The Sinhalese are beyond a doubt one of the least musical people in the world.
It would be quite impossible to have less sense of pitch, line or rhythm. - Paul Bowles
Your voice sounds like a scorpion being pushed
through a glass tube
like someone has just trod on a peacock
like wind howling in a coconut
like a rusty bible, like someone pulling barbed wire
across a stone courtyard, like a pig drowning,
a vattacka being fried
a bone shaking hands
a frog singing at Carnegie Hall.
Like a crow swimming in milk,
like a nose being hit by a mango
like the crowd at the Royal-Thomian match,
a womb full of twins, a pariah dog
with a magpie in its mouth
like the midnight jet from Casablanca
like Air Pakistan curry,
a typewriter on fire, like a hundred
pappadans being crunched, like someone
trying to light matches in a dark room,
the clicking sound of a reef when you put your head into the sea,
a dolphin reciting epic poetry to a sleepy audience,
the sound of a fan when someone throws brinjals at it,
like pineapples being sliced in the Pettah market
like betel juice hitting a butterfly in mid-air
like a whole village running naked onto the street
and tearing their sarongs, like an angry family
pushing a jeep out of the mud, like dirt on the needle,
like 8 sharks being carried on the back of a bicycle
like 3 old ladies locked in the lavatory
like the sound I heard when having an afternoon sleep
and someone walked through my room in ankle bracelets.
Poem/Memoir
Your Mother’s Kitchen – adapted from Rita Dove
Write a poem or a paragraph about your childhood kitchen. Put the oven in it, and also something green, and something dead. You should also decide what day of the week it is. A kitchen is significantly different on Monday morning and Sunday morning. In this poem you are not present, but some female relation—aunt, sister, close friend—must walk into the kitchen during the course of the poem.
Kitchenette Building
Gwendolyn Brooks
We are things of dry hours and the involuntary plan,
Grayed in, and gray. “Dream” makes a giddy sound, not strong
Like “rent,” “feeding a wife,” “satisfying a man.”
But could a dream send up through onion fumes
Its white and violet, fight with fried potatoes
And yesterday’s garbage ripening in the hall,
Flutter, or sing an aria down these rooms
Even if we were willing to let it in,
Had time to warm it, keep it very clean,
Anticipate a message, let it begin?
We wonder. But not well! not for a minute!
Since Number Five is out of the bathroom now,
We think of lukewarm water, hope to get in it.
Fiction
Character Bios – adapted from Amanda Bennett. This writing prompt requires blank paper and some friends.
I.
On a sheet of paper:
1. List 5 character names.
2. List character bio criteria. (Don’t fill in the details, you are just creating
the prompts.)
Pass your paper to a partner.
II.
When you receive your list of 5 names and bio criteria, pick one of the 5 names and then fill in the bio information.
Pass your paper to a third person.
III.
When you receive your completed bio sketch, look it over and decide what stories could be developed from the bio you have before you. Start writing a story about your character. You don’t need to work in all of the backstory in the first paragraph of your story; you just need to know intimately about your character. The point is to have a good sense of who your character is so that the story seems genuine to them.
Drop-In Workshop, JANUARY 2013
Watching Jaws in Reverse, or Writing about Origins
The Objective: For our first piece we are going to write a poem where time seems to travel backwards. Imagine watching the movie Jaws in reverse - a giant shark vomits out people and boats and things and then they open the beach. Another way of thinking about this prompt is to imagine tracing the origins of something back to its component parts. What was a tree before it was a tree? What is the origin of an eyebrow? Something similar happens in John Witte’s poem “As If.”
As If – by John Witte
A swift two
or three flitting over
the abandoned school then more plunging into the chimney
a blurry funnel
their chee and chirring overhead
a multitude scattered across the sky it’s their coming back
that gets us
the air trembling troubled as memory
whistling satiny feathers arranging and rearranging in the dark
cramped shaft
over the dead furnace birds
hurrying down now like smoke billowing back into the chimney
as if smoke
could return to its fire
the wood to its tree in the sun on the hill as if flesh returned
wheeled back
through the locks and chambers
back into its clothes onto the crowded train backing away.
Poetry and/or Fiction
A Proustian Memory (Lesson from Malia Collins)
The Objective: We’re going to write a poem that begins with or concentrates on a "Proustian Memory" experience where an unexpected re-encounter with a scent from the distant past brings forward a series of memories.
Traditionally, we humans have five senses - they're smell, hearing, vision, touch and taste. But only two of these senses are based on chemicals - smell and taste. Smell and taste let us sample the chemicals around us for information. But smell is different from all the other senses in a very special way. A smell from your distant past can unleash a flood of memories that are so intense and striking that they seem real - and we're getting close to understanding why.
This kind of memory, where an unexpected re-encounter with a scent from the distant past brings back a rush of memories, is called a "Proustian Memory". It's named after Marcel Proust, one of the greatest novelists of the 20th century. He describes this phenomenon in the opening chapter of his novel Swann's Way, the first novel in his mammoth seven-part work, Remembrance Of Things Past.
He writes how the smell of a madeleine cake (a small, rich pastry) dipped into a lime-blossom tea, unleashed a rush of brilliantly-clear memory: "And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before mass), when I went to say good morning to her in her bedroom , my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane. The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it; perhaps because I had so often seen such things in the meantime, without tasting them, on the trays in pastry-cooks' windows, that their image had dissociated itself from those Combray days to take its place among others more recent; perhaps because of those memories, so long abandoned and put out of mind, nothing now survived, everything was scattered; the shapes of things, including that of the little scallop-shell of pastry, so richly sensual under its severe, religious folds, were either obliterated or had been so long dormant as to have lost the power of expansion which would have allowed them to resume their place in my consciousness. But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering,
waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of
recollection.
And as soon as I had recognized the taste of the piece of madeleine soaked in her decoction of lime-blossom which my aunt used to give me (although I did not yet know and must long postpone the discovery of why this memory made me so happy)immediately the old grey house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like a stage set to attach itself to the little pavilion opening on to the garden which had been built out behind it for my parents (the isolated segment which until that moment had been all that I could see); and with the house the town, from morning to night and in all weathers, the Square where I used to be sent before lunch, the streets along which I used to run errands, the country roads we took when it was fine. And as in the game wherein the Japanese amuse themselves by filling a porcelain bowl with water and steeping in it little pieces of paper which until then are without character or form, but, the moment they become wet, stretch and twist and take on colour and distinctive shape, become flowers or houses or people, solid and recognizable, so in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann's park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and its surroundings, taking shape and solidity, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.”
Here’s a Billy Collins poem about a similar memory. Notice the reference to Proust in the second stanza.
The Lanyard - Billy Collins
The other day I was ricocheting slowly
off the blue walls of this room,
moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano,
from bookshelf to an envelope lying on thefloor,
when I found myself in the L section of the dictionary
where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.
No cookie nibbled by a French novelist
could send one into the past more suddenly--
a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp
by a deep Adirondack lake
learning how to braid long thin plastic strips
into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.
I had never seen anyone use a lanyard
or wear one, if that’s what you did with them,
but that did not keep me from crossing
strand over strand again and again
until I had made a boxy
red and white lanyard for my mother.
She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard.
She nursed me in many a sick room,
lifted spoons of medicine to my lips,
laid cold face-cloths on my forehead,
and then led me out into the airy light
and taught me to walk and swim,
and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.
Here are thousands of meals, she said,
and here is clothing and a good education.
And here is your lanyard, I replied,
which I made with a little help from a counselor.
Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,
strong legs, bones and teeth,
and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,
and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.
And here, I wish to say to her now,
is a smaller gift—not the worn truth
that you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission that when she took
the two-tone lanyard from my hand,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless, worthless thing I wove
out of boredom would be enough to make us even.
Your turn: Think of a particular smell that evokes a lot of emotion for you. It could be a very benign smell – sagebrush, Old Spice cologne, snowmobile exhaust. Follow this smell across your sensual planet into caves of memory. What do you discover? You could also do this for an imaginary character.
The Objective: For our first piece we are going to write a poem where time seems to travel backwards. Imagine watching the movie Jaws in reverse - a giant shark vomits out people and boats and things and then they open the beach. Another way of thinking about this prompt is to imagine tracing the origins of something back to its component parts. What was a tree before it was a tree? What is the origin of an eyebrow? Something similar happens in John Witte’s poem “As If.”
As If – by John Witte
A swift two
or three flitting over
the abandoned school then more plunging into the chimney
a blurry funnel
their chee and chirring overhead
a multitude scattered across the sky it’s their coming back
that gets us
the air trembling troubled as memory
whistling satiny feathers arranging and rearranging in the dark
cramped shaft
over the dead furnace birds
hurrying down now like smoke billowing back into the chimney
as if smoke
could return to its fire
the wood to its tree in the sun on the hill as if flesh returned
wheeled back
through the locks and chambers
back into its clothes onto the crowded train backing away.
Poetry and/or Fiction
A Proustian Memory (Lesson from Malia Collins)
The Objective: We’re going to write a poem that begins with or concentrates on a "Proustian Memory" experience where an unexpected re-encounter with a scent from the distant past brings forward a series of memories.
Traditionally, we humans have five senses - they're smell, hearing, vision, touch and taste. But only two of these senses are based on chemicals - smell and taste. Smell and taste let us sample the chemicals around us for information. But smell is different from all the other senses in a very special way. A smell from your distant past can unleash a flood of memories that are so intense and striking that they seem real - and we're getting close to understanding why.
This kind of memory, where an unexpected re-encounter with a scent from the distant past brings back a rush of memories, is called a "Proustian Memory". It's named after Marcel Proust, one of the greatest novelists of the 20th century. He describes this phenomenon in the opening chapter of his novel Swann's Way, the first novel in his mammoth seven-part work, Remembrance Of Things Past.
He writes how the smell of a madeleine cake (a small, rich pastry) dipped into a lime-blossom tea, unleashed a rush of brilliantly-clear memory: "And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before mass), when I went to say good morning to her in her bedroom , my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane. The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it; perhaps because I had so often seen such things in the meantime, without tasting them, on the trays in pastry-cooks' windows, that their image had dissociated itself from those Combray days to take its place among others more recent; perhaps because of those memories, so long abandoned and put out of mind, nothing now survived, everything was scattered; the shapes of things, including that of the little scallop-shell of pastry, so richly sensual under its severe, religious folds, were either obliterated or had been so long dormant as to have lost the power of expansion which would have allowed them to resume their place in my consciousness. But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering,
waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of
recollection.
And as soon as I had recognized the taste of the piece of madeleine soaked in her decoction of lime-blossom which my aunt used to give me (although I did not yet know and must long postpone the discovery of why this memory made me so happy)immediately the old grey house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like a stage set to attach itself to the little pavilion opening on to the garden which had been built out behind it for my parents (the isolated segment which until that moment had been all that I could see); and with the house the town, from morning to night and in all weathers, the Square where I used to be sent before lunch, the streets along which I used to run errands, the country roads we took when it was fine. And as in the game wherein the Japanese amuse themselves by filling a porcelain bowl with water and steeping in it little pieces of paper which until then are without character or form, but, the moment they become wet, stretch and twist and take on colour and distinctive shape, become flowers or houses or people, solid and recognizable, so in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann's park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and its surroundings, taking shape and solidity, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.”
Here’s a Billy Collins poem about a similar memory. Notice the reference to Proust in the second stanza.
The Lanyard - Billy Collins
The other day I was ricocheting slowly
off the blue walls of this room,
moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano,
from bookshelf to an envelope lying on thefloor,
when I found myself in the L section of the dictionary
where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.
No cookie nibbled by a French novelist
could send one into the past more suddenly--
a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp
by a deep Adirondack lake
learning how to braid long thin plastic strips
into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.
I had never seen anyone use a lanyard
or wear one, if that’s what you did with them,
but that did not keep me from crossing
strand over strand again and again
until I had made a boxy
red and white lanyard for my mother.
She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard.
She nursed me in many a sick room,
lifted spoons of medicine to my lips,
laid cold face-cloths on my forehead,
and then led me out into the airy light
and taught me to walk and swim,
and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.
Here are thousands of meals, she said,
and here is clothing and a good education.
And here is your lanyard, I replied,
which I made with a little help from a counselor.
Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,
strong legs, bones and teeth,
and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,
and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.
And here, I wish to say to her now,
is a smaller gift—not the worn truth
that you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission that when she took
the two-tone lanyard from my hand,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless, worthless thing I wove
out of boredom would be enough to make us even.
Your turn: Think of a particular smell that evokes a lot of emotion for you. It could be a very benign smell – sagebrush, Old Spice cologne, snowmobile exhaust. Follow this smell across your sensual planet into caves of memory. What do you discover? You could also do this for an imaginary character.
Drop-In Workshop, DECEMBER 2012
Warm-Up - Questions
from Pablo Neruda’s Book of Questions
Tell me, is the rose naked
or is that her only dress?
Why do trees conceal
the splendor of their roots?
Who hears the regrets
of the thieving automobile?
Is there anything in the world sadder
than a train standing in the rain?
For our Warm-Up activity we are each going to receive an object and then we are going to write a list of questions about this object. The questions could pertain to the object’s origins, its uses, its future, its shape, anything at all. The point is to open yourself up to possibilities.
Poem/Story
Narratives, whether they are poems or stories, need some kind of conflict to propel them. Something needs to be at stake for the main character. For our narrative we are going to take Michael Earl Craig’s first line, “He wasn’t supposed to be there,” and apply it to our own story. If you are having trouble thinking up a fictional story, try thinking of a time in your own life where you seemed to be “in the right/wrong place at the right/wrong time.”
Bubbles Came from Their Noses
Michael Earl Craig, Thin Kimono, Wave Books 2010
He wasn’t supposed to be there.
(This is how any number of poems begins.)
He had his goggles. And his nose plugs.
He was underwater, and pretending
to be fixing a ladder
bolted to the side of the pool.
The participants in
the synchronized swimming workshop
eyed him cautiously.
Each of them had their arms out
like Christ on the cross
and they hovered near the bottom,
but not on the bottom,
and this was what fascinated him.
Many of the swimmers had their palms
turned slightly up, their arms
bent a bit at the elbows,
and this gave them the appearance
of those carefully weighing something,
two things I suppose, perhaps pitting
one thing against another, but in a fair
and emotionless manner, and this
made them seem to him both judgmental
and blasé, which he liked.
There were over two dozen of them.
Their hands pendulated a little.
This trued them.
The colors of the pool
were deep blue and turquoise
with shafts of gold light in spots,
and the swimmers farthest from him
looked ghostly, like faded blueprints
of swimmers.
It was calm down there. Serene.
He heard an occasional dull clanking from
he didn’t know where.
Bubbles came from the swimmers’ noses;
they eyed him cautiously.
And then one of them, a chubby one, she
appeared to be the leader…
she made her move.
Her chest was forward, her shoulders back.
She was squinting. Her goggles were clear
and seemed part of her head.
She began to move out ahead of the group.
He sensed a slight buzz in the water.
She reminded him of a seahorse.
She was expressionless.
She moved as if she had a little motor behind her.
She came right at the man,
slowly, and with an eerie purpose.
Dialogue Exercise
Finally, we are going to do a little exercise with dialogue. Dialogue in fiction can be very difficult to write well. What is important to have people say to each other? How do you get the pacing right? How does dialogue help reveal who you’re characters are? How does dialogue further the plot of the story? Try this exercise and see if you can answer some of these questions yourself. -3 sentences of exposition – Describe the scene where this dialogue is taking place.
-Character A asks Character B a question
-Description of a physical gesture made by B
-Statement by A
-Statement by B
-Question by A
-Non-Response by B
-Physical description of A
-Statement by B
-Extended description of setting or some action going on in the background.
-Question by B
-Response by A
-Some sort of physical action on the part of either character
-Question by A
from Pablo Neruda’s Book of Questions
Tell me, is the rose naked
or is that her only dress?
Why do trees conceal
the splendor of their roots?
Who hears the regrets
of the thieving automobile?
Is there anything in the world sadder
than a train standing in the rain?
For our Warm-Up activity we are each going to receive an object and then we are going to write a list of questions about this object. The questions could pertain to the object’s origins, its uses, its future, its shape, anything at all. The point is to open yourself up to possibilities.
Poem/Story
Narratives, whether they are poems or stories, need some kind of conflict to propel them. Something needs to be at stake for the main character. For our narrative we are going to take Michael Earl Craig’s first line, “He wasn’t supposed to be there,” and apply it to our own story. If you are having trouble thinking up a fictional story, try thinking of a time in your own life where you seemed to be “in the right/wrong place at the right/wrong time.”
Bubbles Came from Their Noses
Michael Earl Craig, Thin Kimono, Wave Books 2010
He wasn’t supposed to be there.
(This is how any number of poems begins.)
He had his goggles. And his nose plugs.
He was underwater, and pretending
to be fixing a ladder
bolted to the side of the pool.
The participants in
the synchronized swimming workshop
eyed him cautiously.
Each of them had their arms out
like Christ on the cross
and they hovered near the bottom,
but not on the bottom,
and this was what fascinated him.
Many of the swimmers had their palms
turned slightly up, their arms
bent a bit at the elbows,
and this gave them the appearance
of those carefully weighing something,
two things I suppose, perhaps pitting
one thing against another, but in a fair
and emotionless manner, and this
made them seem to him both judgmental
and blasé, which he liked.
There were over two dozen of them.
Their hands pendulated a little.
This trued them.
The colors of the pool
were deep blue and turquoise
with shafts of gold light in spots,
and the swimmers farthest from him
looked ghostly, like faded blueprints
of swimmers.
It was calm down there. Serene.
He heard an occasional dull clanking from
he didn’t know where.
Bubbles came from the swimmers’ noses;
they eyed him cautiously.
And then one of them, a chubby one, she
appeared to be the leader…
she made her move.
Her chest was forward, her shoulders back.
She was squinting. Her goggles were clear
and seemed part of her head.
She began to move out ahead of the group.
He sensed a slight buzz in the water.
She reminded him of a seahorse.
She was expressionless.
She moved as if she had a little motor behind her.
She came right at the man,
slowly, and with an eerie purpose.
Dialogue Exercise
Finally, we are going to do a little exercise with dialogue. Dialogue in fiction can be very difficult to write well. What is important to have people say to each other? How do you get the pacing right? How does dialogue help reveal who you’re characters are? How does dialogue further the plot of the story? Try this exercise and see if you can answer some of these questions yourself. -3 sentences of exposition – Describe the scene where this dialogue is taking place.
-Character A asks Character B a question
-Description of a physical gesture made by B
-Statement by A
-Statement by B
-Question by A
-Non-Response by B
-Physical description of A
-Statement by B
-Extended description of setting or some action going on in the background.
-Question by B
-Response by A
-Some sort of physical action on the part of either character
-Question by A
Drop-In Workshop, November 2012
Poetry or Fiction: Mysteries of the Mundane – A Poetry Writing Prompt from John Gallaher
1. Visualize a scene for a minute or two without writing anything down (imagined or recalled, though at first it’s better to imagine a recalled scene so that one doesn’t have to work very hard). For a creative writing class (at any level) it’s often good for a scene to be dictated. One I’ve used is camping, as it seems it’s something nearly everyone has done.
2. Title. Dictate the syntax of the title. Something like “The ______ of _____,” where the writers, of course, fill in the
blanks. Unless they’re feeling antic and write something like “The Blank of the Blank.” In that case, it’s fine as well. Now they’re just writing an antic poem is all. The point to a prompt is never the rules of the prompt, but the action of distracting oneself from working one’s imagination too hard on the surface of the poem.
3. The first sentence will be centering on an image of the natural world located in space. Something like “There are trees in the distance” or “One of the boys hid behind the others.” It’s important that one doesn’t work on trying to sound poetic.
4. Try an action sentence now. Some movement across the landscape. Maybe a camper. Some birds.
5. “What are some things the people there have brought with them?” Answer this question in proper short-answer exam style, as in, “describe and discuss.”
6. Quote something someone says. Attribute or don’t, depending.
7. More scene. What might be happening that you’re not aware of? Something to do with the engine, maybe, or the types of trees. Or the light through the trees.
8. Write a sentence starting with “All along.”
9. Two sentence fragments. “The world at large.” “We tell each other.” “The spilling waterfall against the snow.”
10. A sentence of desire. Desire something.
End there or repeat any of the above for as long as you feel like it. For number 8, if you’re going to repeat it, you can change the “all along” to “just like” or "let me" or any other snippet from a title of a Bob Dylan song.
Published in Poets on Teaching – A Source Book edited by Joshua Marie Wilkinson
Fiction: Explode the Moment
Think of a situation where your character experiences a significant moment in his/her life. This should be a moment that takes less than a minute to endure yet it has lasting implications.
Examples: The character accidentally shoots his brother. The lover’s first kiss. The car going off the road. The lover gets off the train
and suddenly things are different. Or you could pick a moment from your own life if you are want to make this into a non-fiction piece.
The Prompt: Write about this moment until it fills up an entire page. Capture the texture of the lover’s lipstick, the lighting, the sound of the birds in the trees, the actions of internal organs. Really get into this scene. What thoughts are going on inside the character’s head? What thoughts aren’t going on inside there? See what happens when you push things to their extreme. You can always cut back later.
As a warm-up to this prompt you might consider eating a very simple food like an apple and practice describing what it tastes like, what it feels like in your mouth, the sounds it makes as you crunch it, the metaphoric possibilities of all this.
1. Visualize a scene for a minute or two without writing anything down (imagined or recalled, though at first it’s better to imagine a recalled scene so that one doesn’t have to work very hard). For a creative writing class (at any level) it’s often good for a scene to be dictated. One I’ve used is camping, as it seems it’s something nearly everyone has done.
2. Title. Dictate the syntax of the title. Something like “The ______ of _____,” where the writers, of course, fill in the
blanks. Unless they’re feeling antic and write something like “The Blank of the Blank.” In that case, it’s fine as well. Now they’re just writing an antic poem is all. The point to a prompt is never the rules of the prompt, but the action of distracting oneself from working one’s imagination too hard on the surface of the poem.
3. The first sentence will be centering on an image of the natural world located in space. Something like “There are trees in the distance” or “One of the boys hid behind the others.” It’s important that one doesn’t work on trying to sound poetic.
4. Try an action sentence now. Some movement across the landscape. Maybe a camper. Some birds.
5. “What are some things the people there have brought with them?” Answer this question in proper short-answer exam style, as in, “describe and discuss.”
6. Quote something someone says. Attribute or don’t, depending.
7. More scene. What might be happening that you’re not aware of? Something to do with the engine, maybe, or the types of trees. Or the light through the trees.
8. Write a sentence starting with “All along.”
9. Two sentence fragments. “The world at large.” “We tell each other.” “The spilling waterfall against the snow.”
10. A sentence of desire. Desire something.
End there or repeat any of the above for as long as you feel like it. For number 8, if you’re going to repeat it, you can change the “all along” to “just like” or "let me" or any other snippet from a title of a Bob Dylan song.
Published in Poets on Teaching – A Source Book edited by Joshua Marie Wilkinson
Fiction: Explode the Moment
Think of a situation where your character experiences a significant moment in his/her life. This should be a moment that takes less than a minute to endure yet it has lasting implications.
Examples: The character accidentally shoots his brother. The lover’s first kiss. The car going off the road. The lover gets off the train
and suddenly things are different. Or you could pick a moment from your own life if you are want to make this into a non-fiction piece.
The Prompt: Write about this moment until it fills up an entire page. Capture the texture of the lover’s lipstick, the lighting, the sound of the birds in the trees, the actions of internal organs. Really get into this scene. What thoughts are going on inside the character’s head? What thoughts aren’t going on inside there? See what happens when you push things to their extreme. You can always cut back later.
As a warm-up to this prompt you might consider eating a very simple food like an apple and practice describing what it tastes like, what it feels like in your mouth, the sounds it makes as you crunch it, the metaphoric possibilities of all this.
Drop-In Workshop, October 2012
Warm-up
For our warm-up we will play some word/sound association games. Many people think that what makes a poem a poem is its use of rhyme. While rhyme is certainly an important element to some poetry, it is not the only use of sound poets use in their poems. Alliteration, assonance and consonance are other important musical elements in a poem.
Here’s a sound poem:
maNNequin
neuTRon
troLLop
lAUNndry
onWards and
upwards
wISe guy
iCIcles
scintillaTe
tonsillectomy
Use a sound from the middle of a word to start your next word. This is a fun game to play in a group. In the end you will have a poem that doesn’t make logical sense, yet it will be alive with the sounds of language. There’s great energy in the sounds of words. Sometimes that is all the logic a poem needs.
Poem
Next we will read the poem below by Amit Majmudar paying close attention to the wordplay he utilizes in his poem. We will then write our own poem that utilizes a similar attention to the sound of language and like Majmudar’s poem wherein someone gives advice to a novice.
Horse Apocalypse BY AMIT MAJMUDAR
Hrhm Shp, colt-culling,
Is what hoof lore calls it--
The choke-chain sound a roan coined
To describe the things he saw
Before the sniff weevils crept
Up his nostrils and chewed
His eyes at the hue-sweet root.
•
Mother mares scare foals
From folly-trots and foxglove
By telling them fury tales
Of muck stirrup-deep and shells
Shoveling Passchendaele
Onto Passchendaele,
The foal fallen with the boy.
•
One memory, common
To all breeds, spurs night mares
Sparking down the mute streets
Of their sleep, gas-blind
Witnesses scraping Krupp
Guns over the cobblestones,
Winged sparks breeding in the hay.
•
Having watched us box and ditch
Our dead, they thought our dead
Ate termite-runnels
In the black bark of the land
And pulled all horsefolk down
To join whatever dark cavalry
Thundered underground.
•
The burlap gas mask cupped
And strapped to the wet snout
Could be mistaken, when
The gas gong sounded
And the men grew fly-heads,
For a feed sack chock-
Full of red ants.
Fiction, Lists
Writers always keep notebooks filled with lists – lists of titles, characters, groceries, aspirations, things to-do, etc. Perhaps you already have lists like this. Our exercise will push you further.
Name the following things:
A desert town
A race horse
A literary magazine
A new disease
An SUV
A rock band
A summer cottage
Triplets
A liqueur
A football team
A diner
A new religion
A new planet
A polluted river
An alien race
A poetry collection
A chihuahua
A burglar
A beauty salon
A new diet
A soap opera
A bar
A new paint color
A yacht
A motel
Once you have your list completed, circle the name you find most interesting. What stories does this name conjure up for you? Write a scene or a story where this name comes into play. What happens when your character finds herself at the Hair Nest getting a perm and Clyde Picket (the burglar) comes in for a trim?
(This idea is from What If by Anne Bernays and Pamela Painter.)
For our warm-up we will play some word/sound association games. Many people think that what makes a poem a poem is its use of rhyme. While rhyme is certainly an important element to some poetry, it is not the only use of sound poets use in their poems. Alliteration, assonance and consonance are other important musical elements in a poem.
Here’s a sound poem:
maNNequin
neuTRon
troLLop
lAUNndry
onWards and
upwards
wISe guy
iCIcles
scintillaTe
tonsillectomy
Use a sound from the middle of a word to start your next word. This is a fun game to play in a group. In the end you will have a poem that doesn’t make logical sense, yet it will be alive with the sounds of language. There’s great energy in the sounds of words. Sometimes that is all the logic a poem needs.
Poem
Next we will read the poem below by Amit Majmudar paying close attention to the wordplay he utilizes in his poem. We will then write our own poem that utilizes a similar attention to the sound of language and like Majmudar’s poem wherein someone gives advice to a novice.
Horse Apocalypse BY AMIT MAJMUDAR
Hrhm Shp, colt-culling,
Is what hoof lore calls it--
The choke-chain sound a roan coined
To describe the things he saw
Before the sniff weevils crept
Up his nostrils and chewed
His eyes at the hue-sweet root.
•
Mother mares scare foals
From folly-trots and foxglove
By telling them fury tales
Of muck stirrup-deep and shells
Shoveling Passchendaele
Onto Passchendaele,
The foal fallen with the boy.
•
One memory, common
To all breeds, spurs night mares
Sparking down the mute streets
Of their sleep, gas-blind
Witnesses scraping Krupp
Guns over the cobblestones,
Winged sparks breeding in the hay.
•
Having watched us box and ditch
Our dead, they thought our dead
Ate termite-runnels
In the black bark of the land
And pulled all horsefolk down
To join whatever dark cavalry
Thundered underground.
•
The burlap gas mask cupped
And strapped to the wet snout
Could be mistaken, when
The gas gong sounded
And the men grew fly-heads,
For a feed sack chock-
Full of red ants.
Fiction, Lists
Writers always keep notebooks filled with lists – lists of titles, characters, groceries, aspirations, things to-do, etc. Perhaps you already have lists like this. Our exercise will push you further.
Name the following things:
A desert town
A race horse
A literary magazine
A new disease
An SUV
A rock band
A summer cottage
Triplets
A liqueur
A football team
A diner
A new religion
A new planet
A polluted river
An alien race
A poetry collection
A chihuahua
A burglar
A beauty salon
A new diet
A soap opera
A bar
A new paint color
A yacht
A motel
Once you have your list completed, circle the name you find most interesting. What stories does this name conjure up for you? Write a scene or a story where this name comes into play. What happens when your character finds herself at the Hair Nest getting a perm and Clyde Picket (the burglar) comes in for a trim?
(This idea is from What If by Anne Bernays and Pamela Painter.)
Drop-In Workshop, September 2012
I. Warm-Up
Proverbs
A proverb is a short, pithy piece of advice.
A proverb is a poem.
A proverb implies a story (more on that later).
Using words from this random list, write some absurd proverbs (or pick your own words):
doughnut
leaf
q-tip
rope
policeman
compass
squirrel
polish
iguana
dentures
wallow
tulip
pancetta
leather
sizzle
kumquat
flank-steak
radish
spider
hot
dog
Examples:
What wallows in the Waldorf is not so much a grape as the hairy man’s pinky.
One’s radish should be blue, lest it become an identity.
Robe thyself in flank steak and never a nightclub be denied.
The orchestra pit is deeper than the pancetta is long.
The purpose of this exercise? To have fun. And to appropriate a commanding voice. Remember, it’s not what you say, it’s how you say it.
II. Poem
For our poem this month we are going to take clues from Richard Hugo and Zachary Schomburg (the poets who inspired this exercise).
In Richard Hugo’s essay “Writing Off the Subject,” he discusses the need for writers to move away from the subject that triggers their poem. He uses the example of Autumn Rain. You start writing about Autumn Rain and soon you run out of things to say. You repeat yourself. You explain. You stop
discovering and creating new truth and just try to reaffirm what you know. All of this kills your writing.
To help us get away from “triggering” subjects, we’re going to write a type of collage poem. We are going to create metaphors that we’ve never
thought of before. To the best of your ability, try not to make these three stanzas relate. Each stanza should come from a different period in your life.
1. First stanza: Describe a childhood memory. Develop the scene, the atmosphere, the place, what you’re doing, thinking, etc. Don’t think of this as a poem. You are just writing a memory as eloquently as possible.
2. Second stanza: Write an apology. Think of a time when you should have apologized for something and didn’t. Now is your time to voice this. Again, don’t forget about concrete details, similes, etc.
3. Third stanza: Write about a time someone gave you a piece of advice. What was the advice?
Once you have these stanzas, play with their order. What does the poem seem to uncover that you might not have thought about before? Is there a
larger metaphor that is coming to the surface? What would be a good title for this poem?
III. Fiction
“One in the Hand”
This idea comes from What If? by Anne Bernays and Pamela Painter.
“A rolling stone gathers no moss.”
“A stitch in time saves nine.”
“A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.”
“A friend in need is a friend indeed.”
“A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.”
“Close only counts in horseshoes and hand-grenades.”
“A watched pot never boils.”
The Exercise: “Take one of the proverbs above (or another on you like) and outline a short story that uses it as both plot and theme.
Proverbs
A proverb is a short, pithy piece of advice.
A proverb is a poem.
A proverb implies a story (more on that later).
Using words from this random list, write some absurd proverbs (or pick your own words):
doughnut
leaf
q-tip
rope
policeman
compass
squirrel
polish
iguana
dentures
wallow
tulip
pancetta
leather
sizzle
kumquat
flank-steak
radish
spider
hot
dog
Examples:
What wallows in the Waldorf is not so much a grape as the hairy man’s pinky.
One’s radish should be blue, lest it become an identity.
Robe thyself in flank steak and never a nightclub be denied.
The orchestra pit is deeper than the pancetta is long.
The purpose of this exercise? To have fun. And to appropriate a commanding voice. Remember, it’s not what you say, it’s how you say it.
II. Poem
For our poem this month we are going to take clues from Richard Hugo and Zachary Schomburg (the poets who inspired this exercise).
In Richard Hugo’s essay “Writing Off the Subject,” he discusses the need for writers to move away from the subject that triggers their poem. He uses the example of Autumn Rain. You start writing about Autumn Rain and soon you run out of things to say. You repeat yourself. You explain. You stop
discovering and creating new truth and just try to reaffirm what you know. All of this kills your writing.
To help us get away from “triggering” subjects, we’re going to write a type of collage poem. We are going to create metaphors that we’ve never
thought of before. To the best of your ability, try not to make these three stanzas relate. Each stanza should come from a different period in your life.
1. First stanza: Describe a childhood memory. Develop the scene, the atmosphere, the place, what you’re doing, thinking, etc. Don’t think of this as a poem. You are just writing a memory as eloquently as possible.
2. Second stanza: Write an apology. Think of a time when you should have apologized for something and didn’t. Now is your time to voice this. Again, don’t forget about concrete details, similes, etc.
3. Third stanza: Write about a time someone gave you a piece of advice. What was the advice?
Once you have these stanzas, play with their order. What does the poem seem to uncover that you might not have thought about before? Is there a
larger metaphor that is coming to the surface? What would be a good title for this poem?
III. Fiction
“One in the Hand”
This idea comes from What If? by Anne Bernays and Pamela Painter.
“A rolling stone gathers no moss.”
“A stitch in time saves nine.”
“A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.”
“A friend in need is a friend indeed.”
“A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.”
“Close only counts in horseshoes and hand-grenades.”
“A watched pot never boils.”
The Exercise: “Take one of the proverbs above (or another on you like) and outline a short story that uses it as both plot and theme.
Drop-In Workshop, August 2012
Warm-Up
For our warm-up this week we will be writing lunes. A lune is a very simple three-line poem like a haiku but simpler. While haiku force you to count syllables, a lune just counts words: three words on the first line, five words on the second line, three words on the last line.
Here’s a quick
example:
The marble
eyes
fall out of the
doll
into my
hands.
Lunes teach you a lot about line-breaks and using concise language. Essentially, you want each line to offer a concrete image. You also want each line to end on a strong word. Ending a line on the word, “the,” would be a disappointment.
You can practice writing these when you can’t sleep.
Renga Poems
Here’s a short description of renga:
"Renga was a form of collaborative poetry, usually written by three or more poets, that was created by giving the tanka, the five-line poem of
the classical anthologies, a sort of call-and-response form. One poet wrote a first verse of three lines in a five syllable-seven syllable-five syllable
pattern [called a HOKKU], and the second poet completed the tanka with two seven-syllable lines...
A third poet writes another three lines, which, together with the previous couplet, make an entirely new poem. Then the next poet adds another
couplet to make a third poem, which is completely independent of the first two. And so on. The seasons change, the subject changes, and, in the classical renga, the poem proceeds through a hundred verses.
Rules developed. The renga had to be written in a certain way. No story could be developed, the seasons had to keep changing, a traditional
image of the autumn moon had to be introduced at least twice, images of spring flowers three times, and so on. The form became immensely popular among educated people at court and in the monasteries. Treatises were written on appropriate ways of making links, and anthologies of examples were published... And it began to spread, as a social activity, to cities and towns, and was taken up by merchants and farmers, some of whom were imitating the refinements of the court, some of whom were drawn to it from the learned traditions of the monastery.
These renga often used a more informal language, treated their subjects playfully, and were shorter, often thirty-six verses long. The 36-verse
form was called a KASEN, and the style of the poetry was called HAIKAI NO RENGA."
Text taken from The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, & Issa. Edited by Robert Hass. (c) 1994, Ecco Press.
For our purposes we will all write a three-line opening stanza. We won’t be counting syllables. Next we will pass our poem to the right, add a two-line stanza; pass, add a three-line stanza, etc. The important thing to remember is that by the third stanza, you should be onto a new topic.
This is an excellent poetry game to do in a group.
Dramatic Monologues
Bruegel’s Peasant Wedding
For our final piece tonight we will be studying
Bruegel’s Peasant Wedding (below).
“Take the voice of one of the characters in the painting and invent that character’s past, his/her feelings at the present, and possibilities for the future. Tune in to the rhythms and diction of your character’s speech as well as his/her emotional makeup. Ask yourself: Does my character like or dislike anyone else in the room? Why? Why not? If my character could talk directly to that person, what would s/he say? Once you’ve thought about what’s on your character’s mind, write down his /her remarks and shape them into a dramatic monologue.”
You can also write a scene including dialogue between two people in the painting.
Text from Mary Swander,“The Peasant Wedding,” published in The Practice of Poetry edited by Robin Behn and Chase Twichell.
1992, Harper Perrenial.
Warm-Up
For our warm-up this week we will be writing lunes. A lune is a very simple three-line poem like a haiku but simpler. While haiku force you to count syllables, a lune just counts words: three words on the first line, five words on the second line, three words on the last line.
Here’s a quick
example:
The marble
eyes
fall out of the
doll
into my
hands.
Lunes teach you a lot about line-breaks and using concise language. Essentially, you want each line to offer a concrete image. You also want each line to end on a strong word. Ending a line on the word, “the,” would be a disappointment.
You can practice writing these when you can’t sleep.
Renga Poems
Here’s a short description of renga:
"Renga was a form of collaborative poetry, usually written by three or more poets, that was created by giving the tanka, the five-line poem of
the classical anthologies, a sort of call-and-response form. One poet wrote a first verse of three lines in a five syllable-seven syllable-five syllable
pattern [called a HOKKU], and the second poet completed the tanka with two seven-syllable lines...
A third poet writes another three lines, which, together with the previous couplet, make an entirely new poem. Then the next poet adds another
couplet to make a third poem, which is completely independent of the first two. And so on. The seasons change, the subject changes, and, in the classical renga, the poem proceeds through a hundred verses.
Rules developed. The renga had to be written in a certain way. No story could be developed, the seasons had to keep changing, a traditional
image of the autumn moon had to be introduced at least twice, images of spring flowers three times, and so on. The form became immensely popular among educated people at court and in the monasteries. Treatises were written on appropriate ways of making links, and anthologies of examples were published... And it began to spread, as a social activity, to cities and towns, and was taken up by merchants and farmers, some of whom were imitating the refinements of the court, some of whom were drawn to it from the learned traditions of the monastery.
These renga often used a more informal language, treated their subjects playfully, and were shorter, often thirty-six verses long. The 36-verse
form was called a KASEN, and the style of the poetry was called HAIKAI NO RENGA."
Text taken from The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, & Issa. Edited by Robert Hass. (c) 1994, Ecco Press.
For our purposes we will all write a three-line opening stanza. We won’t be counting syllables. Next we will pass our poem to the right, add a two-line stanza; pass, add a three-line stanza, etc. The important thing to remember is that by the third stanza, you should be onto a new topic.
This is an excellent poetry game to do in a group.
Dramatic Monologues
Bruegel’s Peasant Wedding
For our final piece tonight we will be studying
Bruegel’s Peasant Wedding (below).
“Take the voice of one of the characters in the painting and invent that character’s past, his/her feelings at the present, and possibilities for the future. Tune in to the rhythms and diction of your character’s speech as well as his/her emotional makeup. Ask yourself: Does my character like or dislike anyone else in the room? Why? Why not? If my character could talk directly to that person, what would s/he say? Once you’ve thought about what’s on your character’s mind, write down his /her remarks and shape them into a dramatic monologue.”
You can also write a scene including dialogue between two people in the painting.
Text from Mary Swander,“The Peasant Wedding,” published in The Practice of Poetry edited by Robin Behn and Chase Twichell.
1992, Harper Perrenial.
July 2, 2012 Drop-In Workshop
Warm-Up
The White Horse
by D.H. Lawrence
The youth walks up to the white horse, puts its halter on
and the horse looks at him in silence.
They are so silent, they are in another world.
Notice how in this poem, something about this horse being white adds so much to the atmosphere of the poem. Think about a color that for you is a particularly quiet color. Write a very short piece where this color features prominently. It should be just a few sentences. It should cause stillness in you. Now, try doing the same thing with a loud color.
Poetry
This poetry prompt is deceptively simple. Write a poem about a perfect day. The challenge is to do this without slipping into clichés or writing what you think should be the perfect day according to other people. As a further challenge, you should somehow use the words, “ooze,” “airplane,” and “pork chop” in your poem. Shoot for a poem that is about 20 lines long. Notice in Gentry’s and Williams’s poems there’s a sense that this day, this pleasure might be totally irrelevant to anyone else but you. If you feel like you are writing for someone else, scream,“Ooze chop!” and start a new line. Voila, perfection.
On a Perfect Day
by Jane Gentry
I eat an artichoke in front
of the Charles Street Laundromat
and watch the clouds bloom
into white flowers out of
the building across the way.
The bright air moves on my face
like the touch of someone who loves me.
Far overhead a dart-shaped plane softens
through membranes of vacancy. A ship,
riding the bright glissade of the Hudson, slips
past the end of the street. Colette's vagabon
says the sun belongs to the lizard
that warms in its light. I own these moments
when my skin like a drumhead stretches on the frame
of my bones, then swells, a bellows filled
with sacred breath seared by this flame,
this happiness.
Pastoral
by William
Carlos Williams
When I was younger
it was plain to me
I must make something of myself.
Older now
I walk back streets
admiring the houses
of the very poor:
roof out of line with sides
the yards cluttered
with old chicken wire, ashes,
furniture gone wrong;
the fences and outhouses
built of barrel staves
and parts of boxes, all,
if I am fortunate,
smeared a bluish green
that properly weathered
pleases me best of all colors.
No one
will believe this
of vast import to the nation.
Fiction
Your fiction prompt comes from our friend Lynard Skynard. It’s 8 o’clock in Boise,
Idaho, alright. Write a story that somehow features either lyrics from this
song, or the narrative of the song. Who is the girl? What does she do for the
rest of the year? Maybe someone is singing this song at a karaoke bar or at a
wedding. Let Skynard be your guide.
What’s Your Name
by Lynard Skynard
Well, its 8 o'clock in Boise, Idaho
I'll find my limo
driver
Mister, take us to the show
I done made some plans
for later
on tonight
I'll find a little queen
And I know I can
treat her
right.
(Chorus)
What's your name, little girl?
What's your name?
Shootin' you straight, little girl?
Won't you do the same?.
Back
at the hotel
Lord we got such a mess
It seems that one of the crew
Had a go with one of the
guests, oh yes
Well, the police
said
we can't drink in the bar
What a shame
Won't you come upstairs girl
And have a drink of champagne
What's your name, little girl?
What's your name?
Shootin' you straight, little girl?
For there
ain't no shame.
(Chorus)
(Chorus)
9
o'clock the
next day
And I'm ready to go
I got six hundred
miles to ride
To
do one more
show, oh no
Can I get you a
taxi home
It sure was
grand
When I come back here next year
I wanna see you again
What
was your name, little girl?
What's your name?
Shootin' you straight,
little girl?
Well there ain't no shame
What was your name, little girl?
What's your name?
Shootin' you straight, little girl?
Won't you do
the same?
June 4, 2012 Drop-In workshop
Warm-Up
For our warm-up activity today we are going to use some sample stanzas from Laynie
Brown’s poem, “Tales in Miniature.” There’s something very intriguing and
mysterious about these three word “tales.” A whole world seems to be created
and extinguished before you even realize what’s happened. I feel like our daily
lives can be kind of like that too. Your job is to write a list of nouns,
verbs, and adjectives that you associate with your day, today. Shoot for maybe
fifty words. Make your list fast. Don’t worry about picking the right word.
Avoid trying to make a narrative. You want to be as random as possible. Once
you have your list. Start piecing together three word
mysteries/tales/poems/stanzas. Think of them as three different flavors that
you want to try eating, or three notes you want to hold in a chord on the
guitar. Once you have created your stanzas, you can either leave them as a
sparse monument to your day, or go on to use these as fodder for longer pieces.
Blow them up into 100 word flash fiction
pieces.
Here’s some of Laynie Browne’s “Tales in
Miniature”:
6
trapping
window
bleat
7
banister
water
wait
8
messenger
harp
rime
10
pard
cleft
ash
11
letter
falcon
hidden
12
rue
daunt
twine
13
stallion
broken
ribbon
14
wintry
purse
dew
The Complaint Poem – We’ve all read odes that
celebrate everything from goats to gods. This month we’re going to write
complaint poems. A great example is Randall Jarrell’s “Woman at the Washington
Zoo.” There are other examples like Blake’s chimney sweep, Shakespeare’s “The
Rape of Lucrece,” etc. Complaint poems are, of course, also great exercises in
character development that are applicable to fiction.
Pick a character (it could be yourself but it’s
better if it isn’t). Make some lists about your character’s life. What do they
want that they aren’t getting? Think about big things and little things, love
and enough mayonnaise on their sandwich. Write a poem from your character’s
perspective as they complain about something in particular. You could also write
this as a letter or as some kind of monologue. To whom is this complaint
addressed? Think of this poem as an act of empathy. You step into someone’s
shoes and see what makes life suck for them. Think about the last customer
service experience you had, write your poem from the perspective of that surly
waiter.
The Woman at the Washington Zoo
Randall
Jarrell
The saris go by me from the embassies.
Cloth from the
moon. Cloth from another planet.
They look back at the leopard like the
leopard.
And I. . . .
This print of mine, that has kept its color
Alive through so many cleanings; this dull null
Navy I wear to work, and wear
from work, and so
To my bed, so to my grave, with no
Complaints, no
comment: neither from my chief,
The Deputy Chief Assistant, nor his
chief--
Only I complain. . . . this serviceable
Body that no sunlight
dyes, no hand suffuses
But, dome-shadowed, withering among columns,
Wavy
beneath fountains—small, far-off, shining
In the eyes of animals, these
beings trapped
As I am trapped but not, themselves, the trap,
Aging, but
without knowledge of their age,
Kept safe here, knowing not of death, for
death--
Oh, bars of my own body, open, open!
The world goes by my cage
and never sees me.
And there come not to me, as come to these,
The wild
beasts, sparrows pecking the llamas' grain,
Pigeons settling on the bears'
bread, buzzards
Tearing the meat the flies have clouded. . . .
Vulture,
When you come for the white rat that
the foxes left,
Take off the red helmet of your head, the black
Wings that
have shadowed me, and step to me as a man:
The wild brother at whose feet the
white wolves fawn,
To whose hand of power the great lioness
Stalks,
purring. . . .
You know what I was,
You see what I am: change
me, change
me!
The Thief in Your
House
(borrowed from Christian
Winn)
In first-person, or close third-person, open a story in which a thief has broken
into your home. Write from the point of view of this thief as they walk into
this home and begin taking what they will and making observations and judgments
about this home they are in (yours). Really concentrate on delivering the space
that you (the writer) are familiar with – the smells, sights, sounds, the
objects, the minutia. As well, concentrate on the character of the person who’s
broken in. Give us their emotions, their state of mind. What was their day like
leading up to this? What could happen during the burglary that could change
either your character or the homeowner (you) for the rest of their life?
Firstly, this is an exercise in seeing strange things in a familiar environment. You are
describing your house. However, this exercise easily flows into plot and emotional development
because the situation has conflict built into it.
Why are you still reading this? The homeowner is going to be here any minute.
Start writing!
Drop-In Workshop - April 2, 2012
1. Warm-up Writing
For our warm-up session this week we are going to
look at a short poem by Lisa Jarnot called,“They Loved Paperclips.” This is an
example of a list poem written in prose. Notice how the rhythm of the list poem
propels you along. This is a great way to let your imagination do some roaming.
As always, if you aren’t a poet, think of this as a way to get to know a
character you are developing better.
They Loved
Paperclips
by Lisa Jarnot
They loved harmony
they loved ant hills they loved food and cookies and harpoons they loved the
sound of laces of the shoes and snow they loved the snow on Thursdays in the
rain and when they met they loved that too and igloos and the trees and things
to mail and chlorine and they loved the towels for the beach and hot dogs and
the pool and also when the wind rose up they loved the ceiling and the tide and
then they loved the sky.
2. “Things to Do in”
Poems
For our next bit of
writing we are going to look at Dan Albergotti’s “Things to do in the Belly of
the Whale” and write our own version of a guidebook of sorts. We will practice
using the 2ndperson and
imperative verbs to create a commanding
voice.
Things to do in the
Belly of the Whale
by Dan
Albergotti
Measure the walls. Count the ribs. Notch the long days.
Look up for blue sky through the spout. Make small fires
with the broken hulls of fishing boats. Practice smoke signals.
Call old friends, and listen for echoes of distant voices.
Organize your calendar. Dream of the beach. Look each way
for the dim glow of light. Work on your reports. Review
each of your life's ten million choices. Endure moments
of self-loathing. Find the evidence of those before you.
Destroy it. Try to be very quiet, and listen for the sound
of gears and moving water. Listen for the sound of your heart.
Be thankful that you are here, swallowed with all hope,
where you can rest and wait. Be nostalgic. Think of all
the things you did and could have done. Remember
treading water in the center of the still night sea, your toes
pointing again and again down, down into the black depths.
3. Solving for X
Our last writing exercise comes from Tyler McMahon the details are as
follows:
Today, you will write a short story
that is exactly twenty-seven sentences long. The first sentence will begin with the
letter ‘A,’ and each proceeding sentence will begin with a sequential letter of
the alphabet (the second with ‘B,’ the third with ‘C,’ and so on) until you end
with the letter ‘X.’ One of your sentences must be exactly one-hundred words
long. Exactly one of your sentences must be a fragment. The other twenty-six
must be grammatically sound.
Remember what Bukowski said about art: “As the spirit wanes/ The form
appears.” Remember that the inverse is also true: As the spirit soars, the form
should disappear. In your story, strive to make the form invisible. That is the
challenge is to be subtle about the form. If it is obvious that the story is
just about forcing a certain letter into the beginning of the sentence, your
story will suffer. Use the difficulty of this exercise to push your imagination
into new places.
Drop-In Workshop March 5, 2012
1.
Warm-up
1. To get your mind going tonight we are going to write in
spirals. Starting at the edge of your paper, write in a circle. Follow the
vortex of your thoughts into ever decreasing size. As for a topic, you might do
the same thing as your writing. Start with a description of the sky or the
planet and end with an atom.
2. Now do the opposite. Starting from the center of your page,
write ever-widening circles. Let your theme grow and grow into
chaos.
2. Poetry
Next we’ll look at a list poem from Dorianne Laux and consider
what the term “broken” means to us. Is “broken” the beginning or the ending of a
story?
What’s Broken
Dorianne Laux
The slate black sky. The middle step
of the back porch. And long ago
my mother’s necklace, the beads
rolling north and south. Broken
the rose stem, water into drops, glass
knobs on the bedroom door. Last summer’s
pot of parsley and mint, white roots
shooting like streamers through the cracks.
Years ago the cat’s tail, the bird bath,
the car hood’s rusted latch. Broken
little finger on my right hand at birth--
I was pulled out too fast. What hasn’t
been rent, divided, split? Broken
the days into nights, the night sky
into stars, the stars into patterns
I make up as I trace them
with a broken-off blade
of grass. Possible, unthinkable,
the cricket’s tiny back as I lie
on the lawn in the dark, my heart
blue cup fallen from someone’s hands.
There’s much to be discussed in this poem from the broken items
she decides to include, their descriptions, to the form of the poem. Her use of
enjambment and couplets gives the poem a lot of tension. We feel things breaking
apart in both form and content. Your job is to take the idea of“broken” and
follow it into your own thoughts and writings. You can write a list of broken
things in your own life. You can write a short lyrical essay about the
importance of saving what’s broken. You can follow the story of the broken
parsley pot in the poem. Go for broke!
3.
Fiction
“The River”
Daniel Grandbois
When one gets out to drag a canoe, one expects to stop dragging it
within a reasonable amount of time and sit in it again. Such was not the case
when Helen, Herbert, and I stepped into what was left of the Kicking Horse
River. We pulled and pushed for three days before Herbert took notice of Helen’s
observations that there wasn’t any water left, much less a riverbed, and that we
might do just as well to wander through the woods like deer. Herbert had to
agree. And yet he couldn’t shake the conviction that the river picked up again
further on. It took us three more days to shake the conviction from him by means
of following along quietly until it worked itself loose.
“I believe we’re in virgin territory,” said Herbert
then.
“Maybe it was,” I quipped, “before we tromped through it.”
“Dragging a canoe,” added Helen, just as pleasant as could be.
We looked
back and found our tracks well preserved. They made the unshakable impression of
belonging to a single animal—something with six legs and a massive tail. Though
we knew better, we grew frightened, not hard to do in unfamiliar terrain. We
felt like helpless jackrabbits. And that is what we became, leaving the canoe
behind and bounding through the woods, which opened out onto a grassy plain.
Once in a while, I ran into Helen or Herbert or both together, but I recognized
them less and less, though I always had a strange desire to linger in their
company as if I’d known them in a previous life.
Gabriel’s story is a kind of creation myth and an invitation for
us to start bending our imaginations away from the normal paths of our thinking
about the world. With this story as your inspiration, write about how things to
be the way they are. One way to go about this is to freewrite a list of
“If/Then” statements. Try writing several. Don’t let logic slow you down.
Finally, unpack the story that seems most promising in one of your
freewrites.
Here’s some examples:
If I feel like a rabbit,
then I must have been a small man dragging a canoe at one point in my
life.
If it is raining, perhaps I
am in jail.
If Tom Petty is playing on the radio, I
must be driving across Nevada and it’s forever sunny.
Warm-up
1. To get your mind going tonight we are going to write in
spirals. Starting at the edge of your paper, write in a circle. Follow the
vortex of your thoughts into ever decreasing size. As for a topic, you might do
the same thing as your writing. Start with a description of the sky or the
planet and end with an atom.
2. Now do the opposite. Starting from the center of your page,
write ever-widening circles. Let your theme grow and grow into
chaos.
2. Poetry
Next we’ll look at a list poem from Dorianne Laux and consider
what the term “broken” means to us. Is “broken” the beginning or the ending of a
story?
What’s Broken
Dorianne Laux
The slate black sky. The middle step
of the back porch. And long ago
my mother’s necklace, the beads
rolling north and south. Broken
the rose stem, water into drops, glass
knobs on the bedroom door. Last summer’s
pot of parsley and mint, white roots
shooting like streamers through the cracks.
Years ago the cat’s tail, the bird bath,
the car hood’s rusted latch. Broken
little finger on my right hand at birth--
I was pulled out too fast. What hasn’t
been rent, divided, split? Broken
the days into nights, the night sky
into stars, the stars into patterns
I make up as I trace them
with a broken-off blade
of grass. Possible, unthinkable,
the cricket’s tiny back as I lie
on the lawn in the dark, my heart
blue cup fallen from someone’s hands.
There’s much to be discussed in this poem from the broken items
she decides to include, their descriptions, to the form of the poem. Her use of
enjambment and couplets gives the poem a lot of tension. We feel things breaking
apart in both form and content. Your job is to take the idea of“broken” and
follow it into your own thoughts and writings. You can write a list of broken
things in your own life. You can write a short lyrical essay about the
importance of saving what’s broken. You can follow the story of the broken
parsley pot in the poem. Go for broke!
3.
Fiction
“The River”
Daniel Grandbois
When one gets out to drag a canoe, one expects to stop dragging it
within a reasonable amount of time and sit in it again. Such was not the case
when Helen, Herbert, and I stepped into what was left of the Kicking Horse
River. We pulled and pushed for three days before Herbert took notice of Helen’s
observations that there wasn’t any water left, much less a riverbed, and that we
might do just as well to wander through the woods like deer. Herbert had to
agree. And yet he couldn’t shake the conviction that the river picked up again
further on. It took us three more days to shake the conviction from him by means
of following along quietly until it worked itself loose.
“I believe we’re in virgin territory,” said Herbert
then.
“Maybe it was,” I quipped, “before we tromped through it.”
“Dragging a canoe,” added Helen, just as pleasant as could be.
We looked
back and found our tracks well preserved. They made the unshakable impression of
belonging to a single animal—something with six legs and a massive tail. Though
we knew better, we grew frightened, not hard to do in unfamiliar terrain. We
felt like helpless jackrabbits. And that is what we became, leaving the canoe
behind and bounding through the woods, which opened out onto a grassy plain.
Once in a while, I ran into Helen or Herbert or both together, but I recognized
them less and less, though I always had a strange desire to linger in their
company as if I’d known them in a previous life.
Gabriel’s story is a kind of creation myth and an invitation for
us to start bending our imaginations away from the normal paths of our thinking
about the world. With this story as your inspiration, write about how things to
be the way they are. One way to go about this is to freewrite a list of
“If/Then” statements. Try writing several. Don’t let logic slow you down.
Finally, unpack the story that seems most promising in one of your
freewrites.
Here’s some examples:
If I feel like a rabbit,
then I must have been a small man dragging a canoe at one point in my
life.
If it is raining, perhaps I
am in jail.
If Tom Petty is playing on the radio, I
must be driving across Nevada and it’s forever sunny.
Drop-In
Workshop February 6, 2012
I. Warm-up (internal organs) Poem
This month we will warm up our imaginations with a little personification exercise.
1. Jot down your favorite internal organ. It doesn’t matter if you know its function in the body, but it can’t hurt. You can use obvious organs like the heart or the liver, but don’t forget about the gallbladder.
2. You are that organ. Write a poem from the perspective of this organ. As you write, consider what kind of character your organ is. Is it an old cowboy that speaks with a lisp? Is it a little boy who just ate some chocolate covered espresso beans? What kind of language seems most appropriate for your organ? Do you use a lot of harsh one-syllable words? Do you use flowery language? Do you swear? What kind of rhythm does your organ have?
Do whatever you can to avoid the obvious as you write.If you feel like you have heard yourself use a particular phrase before, cut it and write a new one. Let your imagination rule your language.
II. A Richard Hugo Poem
We will spend a few minutes looking over extracts from Richard Hugo’s essay, “The Triggering Town.”You can read the essay here.And then we will take a look at Hugo’s poem, “Neighbor.”
Neighbor by Richard Hugo
The drunk who lives across the street from us
fell in our garden, on the beet patch
yesterday. So polite. Pardon me,
he said. He had to be helped up and held,
steered home and put to bed, declaring
we got to have another drink and smile.
I admit my envy. I’ve found him in salal
and flat on his face in lettuce, and bent
and snowing by that thick stump full of rain
we used to sail destroyers on.
And I’ve carried him home so often
stone to the rain and me, and cheerful.
I try to guess what’s in that dim warm mind.
Does he think about horizoned firs
black against the light, thirty years
ago, and the good girl—what’s her name--
believing, or think about the dog
he beat to death that day in Carbonado?
I hear he’s dead, and wait now on my porch.
He must be in his shack. The wagon’s
due to come and take him where they take
late alcoholics, probably called Farm’s End.
I plan my frown, certain he’ll be carried out
bleeding from the corners of his grin.
Your turn (Exercise adapted by John Morrison) Pre-writing
a. First, think of a town. It should be a town that you know, but not one that you are overly sentimental or intimate with. You
should be comfortable inventing lies about this place.
b. Write a list of words that describe this town--the way that you think of it. Go back and circle three of the words that you think are the most interesting or vivid.
c. Write down the name of at least one specific place in the town. It could be a specific gas station, or diner, or barber shop, or bakery, or pool hall, or church, or softball field, or someone's back porch, etc. The place can be real or made up.
Nouns
mud
cloud
belief
river
field
moon
road
wheel
door
pine
Verbs
swing
curve
bruise
throw
speed
touch
wander
crimp
hug
watch
Adjectives
blue
soft
tough
sharp
crushed
cool
smart
loud
salty
dark
Your Poem*
1. Write a draft of a poem that has two stanzas and six lines to each stanza (12 lines altogether).
2. Each line should be between 8 and 14 syllables long. Try to let sentences run over into the next line a few times.
3. The name of the town and the name of the specific place must be mentioned somewhere in the poem.
4. You must use the three words that you circled in "b" somewhere in the poem.
5. You must use the 3 nouns, 3 verbs, and 3 adjectives that you selected from the lists somewhere in your poem. You may make the nouns plural, if you wish, and you may use the verbs in any suitable tense.
6. Your poem may be free verse--or you can use rhyme. If you choose to use rhyme, avoid rhymed couplets.
* Feel free to adapt this to prose. The key is to allow your imagination to roam and not be dominated with what you think you should write about this place.
III. Personal Ads or “For Sale: Baby shoes; never worn.”
Are you Batman? – 35
Ok, so I am a little obsessed with Batman. It is a part of who I am. Some women have their knight in shining armour and I have Batman. I have a good job and enjoy what I do. Yes, I have teenagers and am realizing that they are not going to be around much longer. I like rock music as well as country. I dont like talking about myself but if you would like to know more about me, send me an email.
Go to Craigslist or another similar website and take a look at the personal ads. Here you will find snippets of profiles of people who are just dying to be characters in a story. You can also look in the to-give-away section and find details about people’s lives. Why is someone giving away that rabbit? What is the story there?
Each person will receive a personal ad or some other classified ad. Then we will create stories and character sketches based on the small details we receive.
I. Warm-up (internal organs) Poem
This month we will warm up our imaginations with a little personification exercise.
1. Jot down your favorite internal organ. It doesn’t matter if you know its function in the body, but it can’t hurt. You can use obvious organs like the heart or the liver, but don’t forget about the gallbladder.
2. You are that organ. Write a poem from the perspective of this organ. As you write, consider what kind of character your organ is. Is it an old cowboy that speaks with a lisp? Is it a little boy who just ate some chocolate covered espresso beans? What kind of language seems most appropriate for your organ? Do you use a lot of harsh one-syllable words? Do you use flowery language? Do you swear? What kind of rhythm does your organ have?
Do whatever you can to avoid the obvious as you write.If you feel like you have heard yourself use a particular phrase before, cut it and write a new one. Let your imagination rule your language.
II. A Richard Hugo Poem
We will spend a few minutes looking over extracts from Richard Hugo’s essay, “The Triggering Town.”You can read the essay here.And then we will take a look at Hugo’s poem, “Neighbor.”
Neighbor by Richard Hugo
The drunk who lives across the street from us
fell in our garden, on the beet patch
yesterday. So polite. Pardon me,
he said. He had to be helped up and held,
steered home and put to bed, declaring
we got to have another drink and smile.
I admit my envy. I’ve found him in salal
and flat on his face in lettuce, and bent
and snowing by that thick stump full of rain
we used to sail destroyers on.
And I’ve carried him home so often
stone to the rain and me, and cheerful.
I try to guess what’s in that dim warm mind.
Does he think about horizoned firs
black against the light, thirty years
ago, and the good girl—what’s her name--
believing, or think about the dog
he beat to death that day in Carbonado?
I hear he’s dead, and wait now on my porch.
He must be in his shack. The wagon’s
due to come and take him where they take
late alcoholics, probably called Farm’s End.
I plan my frown, certain he’ll be carried out
bleeding from the corners of his grin.
Your turn (Exercise adapted by John Morrison) Pre-writing
a. First, think of a town. It should be a town that you know, but not one that you are overly sentimental or intimate with. You
should be comfortable inventing lies about this place.
b. Write a list of words that describe this town--the way that you think of it. Go back and circle three of the words that you think are the most interesting or vivid.
c. Write down the name of at least one specific place in the town. It could be a specific gas station, or diner, or barber shop, or bakery, or pool hall, or church, or softball field, or someone's back porch, etc. The place can be real or made up.
Nouns
mud
cloud
belief
river
field
moon
road
wheel
door
pine
Verbs
swing
curve
bruise
throw
speed
touch
wander
crimp
hug
watch
Adjectives
blue
soft
tough
sharp
crushed
cool
smart
loud
salty
dark
Your Poem*
1. Write a draft of a poem that has two stanzas and six lines to each stanza (12 lines altogether).
2. Each line should be between 8 and 14 syllables long. Try to let sentences run over into the next line a few times.
3. The name of the town and the name of the specific place must be mentioned somewhere in the poem.
4. You must use the three words that you circled in "b" somewhere in the poem.
5. You must use the 3 nouns, 3 verbs, and 3 adjectives that you selected from the lists somewhere in your poem. You may make the nouns plural, if you wish, and you may use the verbs in any suitable tense.
6. Your poem may be free verse--or you can use rhyme. If you choose to use rhyme, avoid rhymed couplets.
* Feel free to adapt this to prose. The key is to allow your imagination to roam and not be dominated with what you think you should write about this place.
III. Personal Ads or “For Sale: Baby shoes; never worn.”
Are you Batman? – 35
Ok, so I am a little obsessed with Batman. It is a part of who I am. Some women have their knight in shining armour and I have Batman. I have a good job and enjoy what I do. Yes, I have teenagers and am realizing that they are not going to be around much longer. I like rock music as well as country. I dont like talking about myself but if you would like to know more about me, send me an email.
Go to Craigslist or another similar website and take a look at the personal ads. Here you will find snippets of profiles of people who are just dying to be characters in a story. You can also look in the to-give-away section and find details about people’s lives. Why is someone giving away that rabbit? What is the story there?
Each person will receive a personal ad or some other classified ad. Then we will create stories and character sketches based on the small details we receive.
Drop-in Workshop January 3, 2012
I. Warm-up Activity
A Story of Diminishing Returns
Write a story that is 10 sentences long. The first sentence must be exactly 10 words long. The second must be 9 words, the third must be 8, etc. The last sentence must be one word.
This activity helps you gain control of pacing and helps you with word choice. Try it several times. Try it while you are waiting for a dentist appointment.
II. Poem
In the Lobby of the Hotel Del Mayo
by Raymond Carver
The girl in the lobby reading a leather-bound book.
The man in the lobby using a broom.
The boy in the lobby watering plants.
The desk clerk looking at his nails.
The woman in the lobby writing a letter.
The old man in the lobby sleeping in his chair.
The fan in the lobby revolving slowly overhead.
Another hot Sunday afternoon.
Suddenly, the girl lays her finger between the pages of
her book.
The man leans on his broom and looks.
The boy stops in his tracks.
The desk clerk raises his eyes and stares.
The woman quits writing.
The old man stirs and wakes up.
What is it?
Someone is running up from the harbor.
Someone who has the sun behind him.
Someone who is barechested.
Waving his arms.
It’s clear something terrible has happened.
The man is running straight for the hotel.
His lips are working themselves into a scream.
Everyone in the lobby will recall their terror.
Everyone in the lobby will remember this moment for the rest of
their lives.
Your Turn
This poem is frustratingly vague. What is happening out in the harbor? Who are the people in the lobby of the hotel? Who is running? What do the people look like? Where is the Hotel Del Mayo?
Your task is to use this poem for a jumping off point. The poem is begging you to fill in the blanks. Choose one of the characters from the poem and write a short sketch of what that person’s day was like up until this point. What is at stake for your character at the moment of terror? Or you may try writing a similar poem. Creating a short scene like this may be a chance for you to quickly sketch out a longer piece. It is good practice for writing efficiently and clearly.
III. “It’s All in Your Head”
Our last exercise comes from the book What If by Anne Bernays and Pamela Painter. Here it is:
Write three short paragraphs, the first “fear,” the second “anger,” and the last “pleasure,” without using those words. Try to render these emotions by describing physical sensations or images. If you want, write mini-stories, dramatizing these emotions. Try to make your language precise and fresh.
This exercise is very adaptable. You can write it from an autobiographical perspective or from a character’s perspective. It forces you to avoid cliches and abstractions when describing emotions and to look at what is really happening to you. In a way, it is the antithesis of the Carver poem we read above.
A Story of Diminishing Returns
Write a story that is 10 sentences long. The first sentence must be exactly 10 words long. The second must be 9 words, the third must be 8, etc. The last sentence must be one word.
This activity helps you gain control of pacing and helps you with word choice. Try it several times. Try it while you are waiting for a dentist appointment.
II. Poem
In the Lobby of the Hotel Del Mayo
by Raymond Carver
The girl in the lobby reading a leather-bound book.
The man in the lobby using a broom.
The boy in the lobby watering plants.
The desk clerk looking at his nails.
The woman in the lobby writing a letter.
The old man in the lobby sleeping in his chair.
The fan in the lobby revolving slowly overhead.
Another hot Sunday afternoon.
Suddenly, the girl lays her finger between the pages of
her book.
The man leans on his broom and looks.
The boy stops in his tracks.
The desk clerk raises his eyes and stares.
The woman quits writing.
The old man stirs and wakes up.
What is it?
Someone is running up from the harbor.
Someone who has the sun behind him.
Someone who is barechested.
Waving his arms.
It’s clear something terrible has happened.
The man is running straight for the hotel.
His lips are working themselves into a scream.
Everyone in the lobby will recall their terror.
Everyone in the lobby will remember this moment for the rest of
their lives.
Your Turn
This poem is frustratingly vague. What is happening out in the harbor? Who are the people in the lobby of the hotel? Who is running? What do the people look like? Where is the Hotel Del Mayo?
Your task is to use this poem for a jumping off point. The poem is begging you to fill in the blanks. Choose one of the characters from the poem and write a short sketch of what that person’s day was like up until this point. What is at stake for your character at the moment of terror? Or you may try writing a similar poem. Creating a short scene like this may be a chance for you to quickly sketch out a longer piece. It is good practice for writing efficiently and clearly.
III. “It’s All in Your Head”
Our last exercise comes from the book What If by Anne Bernays and Pamela Painter. Here it is:
Write three short paragraphs, the first “fear,” the second “anger,” and the last “pleasure,” without using those words. Try to render these emotions by describing physical sensations or images. If you want, write mini-stories, dramatizing these emotions. Try to make your language precise and fresh.
This exercise is very adaptable. You can write it from an autobiographical perspective or from a character’s perspective. It forces you to avoid cliches and abstractions when describing emotions and to look at what is really happening to you. In a way, it is the antithesis of the Carver poem we read above.
Drop-in Workshop December 6, 2011
Poetry
This month we will be reading a poem by Günter Grass, called “In the Egg,” and writing our own way out of the “egg” or the “mundane shell” as William Blake called it. Below you will find the poem and the writing prompt, inspired by Portland poet Carlos Reyes. You can write this as either a poem or a piece of “Magical Realism.”
Günter Grass, "In the Egg"
We live in an egg.
We have scribbled up the inside of the shell
with dirty drawings
and the first names of our enemies.
We are being hatched.
Whoever is hatching us
is hatching our pencils too.
Having slipped out some day
we shall immediately
draw a picture of the one hatching us.
We assume that we are being hatched.
We imagine a good-tempered bird
and write school essays
about the color and race
of the hen hatching us.
When will we slip out?
Our prophets in the egg
argue for a moderate time
of the hatching.
They assume a day X.
Out of boredom and real need
we have established our own hatching
chambers.
We watch over our new generations in the egg.
We would like to recommend our charges
to the one watching over us.
We have a roof over our heads.
Senile chicks,
embryos with knowledge of language
talk all day long
even about their dreams.
And if we are not being hatched?
If this shell never gets a hole?
If our horizon is only the horizon
of our scribbling and will remain that?
We hope that we are being hatched.
But even if we only speak of hatching,
there remains to be feared, that someone
outside of our shell, gets hungry
cracks us into a pan and sprinkles us with salt.
What shall we do then, ye brethren in the egg?
Fiction
Next we will be reading the short-short story “Wants” by Grace Paley. In this story the main character runs into her ex-husband at the public library and she is suddenly faced with all of her demons. She discovers a feeling of lack that has been haunting her life and she wants to change it.
Your prompt is to write a short piece of fiction in which your character lists things that she wants. You could even write this as a poem, heavy on anaphora, in which each sentence begins with, “She wants…” As you start discovering this character through her desires, put her in a scene. Where is she when she comes to this realization? Who or what sets her off?
Grace Paley, “Wants”
I saw my ex-husband in the street. I was sitting on the steps of the new library.
Hello, my life, I said. We had once been married for twenty-seven years, so I felt justified.
He said, What? What life? No life of mine.
I said, O.K. I don't argue when there's real disagreement. I got up and went into the library to see how much I owed them.
The librarian said $32 even and you've owed it for eighteen years. I didn't deny anything. Because I don't understand how time passes. I have had those books. I have often thought of them. The library is only two blocks away.
My ex-husband followed me to the Books Returned desk. He interrupted the librarian, who had more to tell. In many ways, he said, as I look back, I attribute the dissolution of our marriage to the fact that you never invited the Bertrams to dinner.
That's possible, I said. But really, if you remember: first, my father was sick that Friday, then the children were born, then I had those Tuesday-night meetings, then the war began. Then we didn't seem to know them any more. But you're right. I should have had them to dinner.
I gave the librarian a check for $32. Immediately she trusted me, put my past behind her, wiped the record clean, which is just what most other municipal and/or state bureaucracies will not do.
I checked out the two Edith Wharton books I had just returned because I'd read them so long ago and they are more apropos now than ever. They were The House of Mirth and The Children, which is about how life in the United States in New York changed in twenty-seven years fifty years ago.
A nice thing I do remember is breakfast, my ex-husband said. I was surprised. All we ever had was coffee.
Then I remembered there was a hole in the back of the kitchen closet which opened into the apartment next door. There, they always ate sugar-cured smoked bacon. It gave us a very grand feeling about breakfast, but we never got stuffed and sluggish.
That was when we were poor, I said.
When were we ever rich? he asked.
Oh, as time went on, as our responsibilities increased, we didn't go in need. You took adequate financial care, I reminded him. The children went to camp four weeks a year and in decent ponchos with sleeping bags and boots, just like everyone else. They looked very nice. Our place was warm in winter, and we had nice red pillows and things.
I wanted a sailboat, he said. But you didn't want anything.
Don't be bitter, I said. It's never too late.
No, he said with a great deal of bitterness. I may get a sailboat. As a matter of fact I have money down on an eighteen-foot two-rigger. I'm doing well this year and can look forward to better. But as for you, it's too late. You'll always want nothing.
He had had a habit throughout the twenty-seven years of making a narrow remark which, like a plumber's snake, could work its way through the ear down the throat, half-way to my heart. He would then disappear, leaving me choking with equipment. What I mean is, I sat down on the library steps and he went away.
I looked through The House of Mirth, but lost interest. I felt extremely accused. Now, it's true, I'm short of requests and absolute requirements. But I do want something.
I want, for instance, to be a different person. I want to be the woman who brings these two books back in two weeks. I want to be the effective citizen who changes the school system and addresses the Board of Estimate on the troubles of this dear urban center.
I had promised my children to end the war before they grew up.
I wanted to have been married forever to one person, my ex-husband or my present one. Either has enough character for a whole life, which as it turns out is really not such a long time. You couldn't exhaust either man's qualities or get under the rock of his reasons in one short life.
Just this morning I looked out the window to watch the street for a while and saw that the little sycamores the city had dreamily planted a couple of years before the kids were born had come that day to the prime of their lives.
Well! I decided to bring those two books back to the library. Which proves that when a person or an event comes along to jolt or appraise me I can take some appropriate action, although I am better known for my hospitable remarks.
This month we will be reading a poem by Günter Grass, called “In the Egg,” and writing our own way out of the “egg” or the “mundane shell” as William Blake called it. Below you will find the poem and the writing prompt, inspired by Portland poet Carlos Reyes. You can write this as either a poem or a piece of “Magical Realism.”
- Pick a bird.
- You are in that bird’s egg.
- Write about your world in there (friends, family, books, stereo, pool, television: any detail, size is of no consequence… if you want you can have a soccer stadium or a yacht in your egg.)
- Write about what you think the world outside is like (you’ve never been there, but some hints might be: you sense temperature changes, you feel vibrations and hear muffled sounds…). Perhaps you have heard legends from others who have been outside the shell. What has been written about the outside world?
- Write your way out (devise some inventive way of escaping your egg).
- Make up a title for your piece.
Günter Grass, "In the Egg"
We live in an egg.
We have scribbled up the inside of the shell
with dirty drawings
and the first names of our enemies.
We are being hatched.
Whoever is hatching us
is hatching our pencils too.
Having slipped out some day
we shall immediately
draw a picture of the one hatching us.
We assume that we are being hatched.
We imagine a good-tempered bird
and write school essays
about the color and race
of the hen hatching us.
When will we slip out?
Our prophets in the egg
argue for a moderate time
of the hatching.
They assume a day X.
Out of boredom and real need
we have established our own hatching
chambers.
We watch over our new generations in the egg.
We would like to recommend our charges
to the one watching over us.
We have a roof over our heads.
Senile chicks,
embryos with knowledge of language
talk all day long
even about their dreams.
And if we are not being hatched?
If this shell never gets a hole?
If our horizon is only the horizon
of our scribbling and will remain that?
We hope that we are being hatched.
But even if we only speak of hatching,
there remains to be feared, that someone
outside of our shell, gets hungry
cracks us into a pan and sprinkles us with salt.
What shall we do then, ye brethren in the egg?
Fiction
Next we will be reading the short-short story “Wants” by Grace Paley. In this story the main character runs into her ex-husband at the public library and she is suddenly faced with all of her demons. She discovers a feeling of lack that has been haunting her life and she wants to change it.
Your prompt is to write a short piece of fiction in which your character lists things that she wants. You could even write this as a poem, heavy on anaphora, in which each sentence begins with, “She wants…” As you start discovering this character through her desires, put her in a scene. Where is she when she comes to this realization? Who or what sets her off?
Grace Paley, “Wants”
I saw my ex-husband in the street. I was sitting on the steps of the new library.
Hello, my life, I said. We had once been married for twenty-seven years, so I felt justified.
He said, What? What life? No life of mine.
I said, O.K. I don't argue when there's real disagreement. I got up and went into the library to see how much I owed them.
The librarian said $32 even and you've owed it for eighteen years. I didn't deny anything. Because I don't understand how time passes. I have had those books. I have often thought of them. The library is only two blocks away.
My ex-husband followed me to the Books Returned desk. He interrupted the librarian, who had more to tell. In many ways, he said, as I look back, I attribute the dissolution of our marriage to the fact that you never invited the Bertrams to dinner.
That's possible, I said. But really, if you remember: first, my father was sick that Friday, then the children were born, then I had those Tuesday-night meetings, then the war began. Then we didn't seem to know them any more. But you're right. I should have had them to dinner.
I gave the librarian a check for $32. Immediately she trusted me, put my past behind her, wiped the record clean, which is just what most other municipal and/or state bureaucracies will not do.
I checked out the two Edith Wharton books I had just returned because I'd read them so long ago and they are more apropos now than ever. They were The House of Mirth and The Children, which is about how life in the United States in New York changed in twenty-seven years fifty years ago.
A nice thing I do remember is breakfast, my ex-husband said. I was surprised. All we ever had was coffee.
Then I remembered there was a hole in the back of the kitchen closet which opened into the apartment next door. There, they always ate sugar-cured smoked bacon. It gave us a very grand feeling about breakfast, but we never got stuffed and sluggish.
That was when we were poor, I said.
When were we ever rich? he asked.
Oh, as time went on, as our responsibilities increased, we didn't go in need. You took adequate financial care, I reminded him. The children went to camp four weeks a year and in decent ponchos with sleeping bags and boots, just like everyone else. They looked very nice. Our place was warm in winter, and we had nice red pillows and things.
I wanted a sailboat, he said. But you didn't want anything.
Don't be bitter, I said. It's never too late.
No, he said with a great deal of bitterness. I may get a sailboat. As a matter of fact I have money down on an eighteen-foot two-rigger. I'm doing well this year and can look forward to better. But as for you, it's too late. You'll always want nothing.
He had had a habit throughout the twenty-seven years of making a narrow remark which, like a plumber's snake, could work its way through the ear down the throat, half-way to my heart. He would then disappear, leaving me choking with equipment. What I mean is, I sat down on the library steps and he went away.
I looked through The House of Mirth, but lost interest. I felt extremely accused. Now, it's true, I'm short of requests and absolute requirements. But I do want something.
I want, for instance, to be a different person. I want to be the woman who brings these two books back in two weeks. I want to be the effective citizen who changes the school system and addresses the Board of Estimate on the troubles of this dear urban center.
I had promised my children to end the war before they grew up.
I wanted to have been married forever to one person, my ex-husband or my present one. Either has enough character for a whole life, which as it turns out is really not such a long time. You couldn't exhaust either man's qualities or get under the rock of his reasons in one short life.
Just this morning I looked out the window to watch the street for a while and saw that the little sycamores the city had dreamily planted a couple of years before the kids were born had come that day to the prime of their lives.
Well! I decided to bring those two books back to the library. Which proves that when a person or an event comes along to jolt or appraise me I can take some appropriate action, although I am better known for my hospitable remarks.
Drop-In Workshop (Online) November 1, 2011
To start things out this week we will be reading two poems about parents and childhood and quiet places: Rilke’s “From a Childhood” and Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays”. We will then write our own piece that is a meditation on either childhood or secret quiet times in our life.
Writers are invited to write either prose or poetry. As Kenneth Koch suggests in his book, Rose, Where did you get that
Red, you might try starting this piece with “I never told anyone how much I liked . . .” Follow your writing into the warmth and quiet darkness of these poems.
From a Childhood
Rainer Maria Rilke
The darkening was like riches in the room
in which the boy, withdrawn and secret, sat.
And when his mother entered as in a dream,
a glass quivered in the silent cabinet.
She felt how the room had given her away,
and kissed her boy: are you here? . . .
Then both gazed timidly towards the piano,
for many an evening she would play a song
in which the child was strangely deeply caught.
He sat quite still. His big gaze hung
upon her hand which, all bowed down by the ring,
as it were heavily in snowdrifts going,
over the white keys went.
--translated by M.D. Herter Norton, in Talking to the Sun
Those Winter Sundays
Robert Hayden
Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I’d wake and hear the cold
splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?
Our second piece of writing will be a portrait or a eulogy. November 2nd is the Day of the Dead; a time when many place marigolds and chrysanthemums on loved ones’ graves. The prompt gives instructions for each sentence. Because this prompt is so specific, writers are forced to find creative ways around the rules and to make the piece flow together. I have done this prompt many times and it never fails to produce surprising results. Below are the
sentence-by-sentence prompts for this piece:
1. Picture someone in your mind.
It could be a relative or a friend, living or dead.
2. For a title, choose an emotion or a color that represents this person. You will
not mention the person’s name in the writing.
3. For a first line starter, choose one of the following:
• You stand there...
• No one is here...
• In this (memory,
photograph, dream, or whatever) you are...
• I think sometimes...
• The face is...
• We had been...
Complete this sentence.
4. After your first sentence, build a portrait of
this individual, writing the sentences according to the following
directions:
Sentence 1: Write a sentence with a smell in it and a reference
to the sky.
Sentence 2: Write a sentence with a color in it.
Sentence 3: Write a sentence with a part of the body in it.
Sentence 4: Write a sentence with a simile (a comparison using like or as).
Sentence 5: Write a sentence of over twenty-five words.
Sentence 6: Write a sentence under eight words.
Sentence 7: Write a sentence with a piece of clothing in it.
Sentence 8: Write a sentence with a wish in it.
Sentence 9: Write a sentence with an animal in it.
Sentence 10: Write a sentence in which 3 or more words alliterate; that is they begin
with the same initial consonant: "She has been left lately with less and less
time to think..."
Sentence 11: Write a sentence with two commas in it.
Sentence 12: Write a sentence with a smell or a color in it.
Sentence 13: Write a sentence with a simile (a comparison using like or as).
Sentence 14: Write a sentence with a thought that could carry an exclamation point (but don't use the exclamation
point).
Sentence 15: Write a sentence with a thought to end this portrait that uses the word or words you
chose for a title.
-from Working Words: The Process of Creative
Writing by W. Bishop
Writers are invited to write either prose or poetry. As Kenneth Koch suggests in his book, Rose, Where did you get that
Red, you might try starting this piece with “I never told anyone how much I liked . . .” Follow your writing into the warmth and quiet darkness of these poems.
From a Childhood
Rainer Maria Rilke
The darkening was like riches in the room
in which the boy, withdrawn and secret, sat.
And when his mother entered as in a dream,
a glass quivered in the silent cabinet.
She felt how the room had given her away,
and kissed her boy: are you here? . . .
Then both gazed timidly towards the piano,
for many an evening she would play a song
in which the child was strangely deeply caught.
He sat quite still. His big gaze hung
upon her hand which, all bowed down by the ring,
as it were heavily in snowdrifts going,
over the white keys went.
--translated by M.D. Herter Norton, in Talking to the Sun
Those Winter Sundays
Robert Hayden
Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I’d wake and hear the cold
splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?
Our second piece of writing will be a portrait or a eulogy. November 2nd is the Day of the Dead; a time when many place marigolds and chrysanthemums on loved ones’ graves. The prompt gives instructions for each sentence. Because this prompt is so specific, writers are forced to find creative ways around the rules and to make the piece flow together. I have done this prompt many times and it never fails to produce surprising results. Below are the
sentence-by-sentence prompts for this piece:
1. Picture someone in your mind.
It could be a relative or a friend, living or dead.
2. For a title, choose an emotion or a color that represents this person. You will
not mention the person’s name in the writing.
3. For a first line starter, choose one of the following:
• You stand there...
• No one is here...
• In this (memory,
photograph, dream, or whatever) you are...
• I think sometimes...
• The face is...
• We had been...
Complete this sentence.
4. After your first sentence, build a portrait of
this individual, writing the sentences according to the following
directions:
Sentence 1: Write a sentence with a smell in it and a reference
to the sky.
Sentence 2: Write a sentence with a color in it.
Sentence 3: Write a sentence with a part of the body in it.
Sentence 4: Write a sentence with a simile (a comparison using like or as).
Sentence 5: Write a sentence of over twenty-five words.
Sentence 6: Write a sentence under eight words.
Sentence 7: Write a sentence with a piece of clothing in it.
Sentence 8: Write a sentence with a wish in it.
Sentence 9: Write a sentence with an animal in it.
Sentence 10: Write a sentence in which 3 or more words alliterate; that is they begin
with the same initial consonant: "She has been left lately with less and less
time to think..."
Sentence 11: Write a sentence with two commas in it.
Sentence 12: Write a sentence with a smell or a color in it.
Sentence 13: Write a sentence with a simile (a comparison using like or as).
Sentence 14: Write a sentence with a thought that could carry an exclamation point (but don't use the exclamation
point).
Sentence 15: Write a sentence with a thought to end this portrait that uses the word or words you
chose for a title.
-from Working Words: The Process of Creative
Writing by W. Bishop
Drop-in (Online) October 4, 2011
This month we will be concentrating on grounding abstraction in concrete language. Abstractions are things like joy, fear, anger, infinity, difficulty, soul, etc. Idea words that we like to throw around but that are so vague, we all have our own definitions for them. We will first look at the poem “Weekend in the Country” by C.D. Wright and then write our own poem that captures the mood of a certain day of the week for us. Then we will move into a personal exploration of certain emotions in our lives.
For more information on the poet C.D. Wright visit http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/c-d-wright.
TRANSLATIONS: IDEA TO IMAGE (FOR A GROUP)
Carol Muske (from The Practice of Poetry, edited by Robin Behn & Chase Twichell)
This is an exercise I've tried with students from preschool MFA programs, mainly to prove that the mind does not “think” in abstractions.
I'd like you all to shut your eyes and I'll say a word. Open your eyes and write down what you "saw." For example, if I say "justice," you may see the lady with the scales or a judge with a gavel or a courtroom. This is the mind's "translation" of an idea, an abstract concept to a mental picture, an image. The mind does this naturally.
For example:
DEATH coffin, grave, tombstone, a shirt draped over a chair
Please write down your images. Be honest about what you see. Don't worry if you see a Brussels sprout when I say "death"—your mind is telling you something. It's making a connection, which may not be readily apparent to you. There is no such thing as a mistake or a coincidence, the mind always has logic; it might not be obvious logic, but the mind has its reasons for connecting two seemingly unlike notions.
Two pieces of paper, three columns each.
Follow the images you see. If I say "death" and you see a Brussels sprout, continue to look at that image and write down the next image that it inspires, and the next. Let's say you see a hand picking up the broccoli, or a toy next to it. You recognize the hand as yours, your hand as a child, you begin to enlarge the frame, you see it's you as a baby eating broccoli for the first time, first coming into contact with something you really hated. Or the images keep coming and stay mysterious. That's OK too, but keep the record, write down these signals from the unconscious. Writing is an intuitive process; we must trust our intuition.
Once you have a good long list of images, try putting them together, on a separate sheet of paper, into a poem. The theme of your poem will be the abstract idea the images come out of – justice or love or the soul. Pick one column/idea as the center of your poem and the main source for your images, but mix in some stuff from the other columns too, and, if the person next to you doesn’t mind, swipe an image or two from his columns too. Again, trust your intuition to turn this into a poem, go where the images take you, but don’t forget the idea (love, soul, etc.) that the poem is supposed to be about.
Try it with the following words:
LOVE SOUL FREEDOM
Then try to write a poem about love, the soul, or freedom, based on the images you’ve come up with.
TimeLine of your Life, a Non-Fiction Essay Starter
This idea comes from Bruce Ballenger, professor of creative non-fiction and composition at Boise State.
Make a timeline of your life.
Draw a line across your page and start marking places where significant things occurred. Think about places you lived, people you knew, people you lost. Decisions you had to make. Moments of growth. Moments of significant change. Ceremonies.
Your timeline can show duration and specific moments.
After you’ve sketched out your life, write an abstraction at the top of a new sheet of paper. An abstraction is an idea like joy, hard work, repulsion, peace, sadness, anger, self-loathing, fear, anxiety, etc. This abstraction will be the title for your piece. Pick one of the moments from your timeline that illustrates this abstraction. Do not mention the abstraction in the text. Your audience should be able to discern the abstraction by reading the essay.
For more information on the poet C.D. Wright visit http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/c-d-wright.
TRANSLATIONS: IDEA TO IMAGE (FOR A GROUP)
Carol Muske (from The Practice of Poetry, edited by Robin Behn & Chase Twichell)
This is an exercise I've tried with students from preschool MFA programs, mainly to prove that the mind does not “think” in abstractions.
I'd like you all to shut your eyes and I'll say a word. Open your eyes and write down what you "saw." For example, if I say "justice," you may see the lady with the scales or a judge with a gavel or a courtroom. This is the mind's "translation" of an idea, an abstract concept to a mental picture, an image. The mind does this naturally.
For example:
DEATH coffin, grave, tombstone, a shirt draped over a chair
Please write down your images. Be honest about what you see. Don't worry if you see a Brussels sprout when I say "death"—your mind is telling you something. It's making a connection, which may not be readily apparent to you. There is no such thing as a mistake or a coincidence, the mind always has logic; it might not be obvious logic, but the mind has its reasons for connecting two seemingly unlike notions.
Two pieces of paper, three columns each.
Follow the images you see. If I say "death" and you see a Brussels sprout, continue to look at that image and write down the next image that it inspires, and the next. Let's say you see a hand picking up the broccoli, or a toy next to it. You recognize the hand as yours, your hand as a child, you begin to enlarge the frame, you see it's you as a baby eating broccoli for the first time, first coming into contact with something you really hated. Or the images keep coming and stay mysterious. That's OK too, but keep the record, write down these signals from the unconscious. Writing is an intuitive process; we must trust our intuition.
Once you have a good long list of images, try putting them together, on a separate sheet of paper, into a poem. The theme of your poem will be the abstract idea the images come out of – justice or love or the soul. Pick one column/idea as the center of your poem and the main source for your images, but mix in some stuff from the other columns too, and, if the person next to you doesn’t mind, swipe an image or two from his columns too. Again, trust your intuition to turn this into a poem, go where the images take you, but don’t forget the idea (love, soul, etc.) that the poem is supposed to be about.
Try it with the following words:
LOVE SOUL FREEDOM
Then try to write a poem about love, the soul, or freedom, based on the images you’ve come up with.
TimeLine of your Life, a Non-Fiction Essay Starter
This idea comes from Bruce Ballenger, professor of creative non-fiction and composition at Boise State.
Make a timeline of your life.
Draw a line across your page and start marking places where significant things occurred. Think about places you lived, people you knew, people you lost. Decisions you had to make. Moments of growth. Moments of significant change. Ceremonies.
Your timeline can show duration and specific moments.
After you’ve sketched out your life, write an abstraction at the top of a new sheet of paper. An abstraction is an idea like joy, hard work, repulsion, peace, sadness, anger, self-loathing, fear, anxiety, etc. This abstraction will be the title for your piece. Pick one of the moments from your timeline that illustrates this abstraction. Do not mention the abstraction in the text. Your audience should be able to discern the abstraction by reading the essay.
Drop-in Workshop (Online) September 6, 2011
Warm-Up
The warm-up exercise for this month is to take a line of a poem and to follow its logic with your own words. Whatever comes to mind following this line, write it down. Try to make your lines just as long as the first line. Once you have a sufficient poem, erase the first line.
Here’s an example line from Sylvia Plath’s poem “Totem”:
“They buzz like blue children.”
An Ekphrasistic Poem
After our warm-up we will be reading Ginny Lowe-Connors’ poem “Wheatfield with Crows” and looking at Vincent Van Gogh’s painting of the same title. You can see the painting and read the poem here.
Next we will try our poetic response to another Van Gogh painting, “Noon: Rest from Work (after Millet).”
The poem we write will be have a few rules:
- it should start with a question
- it should be no more than 15 lines long
- it should have no more than 8 words per line
- it should incorporate at least two smells
Hard Returns - A Story About Going on a Trip
Our final prompt will be to write about a road trip. This prompt comes from writer, Tyler McMahon.
Hard Returns – by Tyler McMahon
You’re going to write a story that takes place inside a car—any kind of car (toy, train, automobile, subway, etc. hopefully moving, but maybe not)—with 2 characters, one of which is a 1st person or “I” narrator. These characters can have any kind of relationship you want: best friends, spouses, in-laws, business partners, hitch-hikers, circus clowns, whatever.
I’m going to read you the first half of your first sentence of your first paragraph.
Use that as a starting point. Add to it with sentences of your own and complete the paragraph.
Every few minutes, I’m going to read more half-sentences to begin a new paragraph.
The idea here is to start thinking beyond outward destinations, and to think about inward destinations as well, and to think about action and story in non-linear way.
First Halves:
We’d been in the car for hours, and it was my turn to…
I desperately needed a…
So far, I hadn’t told anyone about the…
The floor of the car was covered in…
In the days before the ceremony, everyone had acted so…
Outside the car window, I watched as a...
My eyes hurt from all the…
The first thing we’d do once we got out of this car was…
It wasn’t so much about money as it was about…
Everything I knew about cars came from…
For a second, we looked each other in the eye and I asked…
Years later, I would…
When I finally stepped out of the car, I took one last look inside and said…
The warm-up exercise for this month is to take a line of a poem and to follow its logic with your own words. Whatever comes to mind following this line, write it down. Try to make your lines just as long as the first line. Once you have a sufficient poem, erase the first line.
Here’s an example line from Sylvia Plath’s poem “Totem”:
“They buzz like blue children.”
An Ekphrasistic Poem
After our warm-up we will be reading Ginny Lowe-Connors’ poem “Wheatfield with Crows” and looking at Vincent Van Gogh’s painting of the same title. You can see the painting and read the poem here.
Next we will try our poetic response to another Van Gogh painting, “Noon: Rest from Work (after Millet).”
The poem we write will be have a few rules:
- it should start with a question
- it should be no more than 15 lines long
- it should have no more than 8 words per line
- it should incorporate at least two smells
Hard Returns - A Story About Going on a Trip
Our final prompt will be to write about a road trip. This prompt comes from writer, Tyler McMahon.
Hard Returns – by Tyler McMahon
You’re going to write a story that takes place inside a car—any kind of car (toy, train, automobile, subway, etc. hopefully moving, but maybe not)—with 2 characters, one of which is a 1st person or “I” narrator. These characters can have any kind of relationship you want: best friends, spouses, in-laws, business partners, hitch-hikers, circus clowns, whatever.
I’m going to read you the first half of your first sentence of your first paragraph.
Use that as a starting point. Add to it with sentences of your own and complete the paragraph.
Every few minutes, I’m going to read more half-sentences to begin a new paragraph.
The idea here is to start thinking beyond outward destinations, and to think about inward destinations as well, and to think about action and story in non-linear way.
First Halves:
We’d been in the car for hours, and it was my turn to…
I desperately needed a…
So far, I hadn’t told anyone about the…
The floor of the car was covered in…
In the days before the ceremony, everyone had acted so…
Outside the car window, I watched as a...
My eyes hurt from all the…
The first thing we’d do once we got out of this car was…
It wasn’t so much about money as it was about…
Everything I knew about cars came from…
For a second, we looked each other in the eye and I asked…
Years later, I would…
When I finally stepped out of the car, I took one last look inside and said…
Drop-in Workshop (Online) August 3, 2011
Our warm-up activity this month consists of choosing 6-8 verbs
and nouns at random from the list below, and pairing them up for a
strange, surreal poem. The challenge here is to break you from familiar pairings
of verbs and nouns. Too often we find ourselves using tired phrases: birds soar,
clocks strike, bulls charge, etc. Try something new.
After our warm-up we took a look at Wallace Stevens’ poem “A
Rabbit as King of the Ghosts”. This poem uses the 2nd person and steps into the
mind of a rabbit in the sleepy heat of August. A perfect poem for our season.
Stevens imagines a perfect day in the mind of a rabbit. The predators, if there
are any, are small and green. In response to Stevens we wrote our own poem in
the 2nd person where the “you” in the poem is a loved one. Imagine a perfect
day in the mind of someone you love and write about. For example if you were
writing about your cat, you might say: All the doors in the house are open /
your indecision is not a decision today / you sleep in a square of sunshine on
the floor / when you wake up your tail has never been so many species of mice.
Finally, we looked at a fiction prompt from author
Valerie Kiesig. This prompt asks
us to move from character sketches to plot. We first brainstormed a variety of
character relationships and then put these characters into a particular
situation (the more uncomfortable, the better). An example character
relationship I chose was ex-lovers – he’s still smitten, she’s moved on – until
she has a favor to ask of him. Is it a chance to rekindle the relationship? Or
will he be a schmuck for the rest of his life?
A Noun Verbing Emergency!
Pick 6 verbs and 6 nouns. Write a poem that uses one verb and one
noun per line in the most surprising ways you can think. Start your poem with
some kind of an emergency. The things that happen next are what you do to fix
the emergency. (Of course, maybe it won’t work!) After you do six, come up with
your own strange verb/noun combination.
Example:
I had lost my mind so
I gassed the ocean with my armpits
I buttered the cockroach
I undid the birthday cake from the calendar
but
my mind was still willynilly in the rafters
I zipped the dingo into a necklace
I wiped the planet clean with my elbow
I blasted the omelet
I planted the queen in the asteroid belt
and still my mind was illogical in a saddle bag
so now what will I do?
Verbs
nail
churn
skip
tickled
plant
yodel
rope
blast
discover
hold
whip
chew
gas
welcome
torch
assume
zip
trot
pounce
paint
wipe
sing
click
gum
pluck
rule
milk
undo
echo
vacuum
knock
label
scrub
hatch
miss
bug
black
trace
crunch
inspect
glimpse
ogle
ruin
break
Nouns
pineapple
pony
glove
whale
cowboy
xray
quail
puppy
zebra
xylophone
custard
caboose
lollipop
dingo
sandwich
bicycle
pine tree
television
Uncle Rothko
nightlight
cannibal
birthday cake
elephant
planet
pick-up truck
backpack
needle
measuring tape
Queen
dragon’s tail
rainbow
angel
robin
Easter egg
Christmas Tree
shopping center
hamburger
oil spill
hurricane
birthmark
cockroach
ice cube
A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts
by Wallace Stevens
The difficulty to think at the end of day,
When the shapeless
shadow covers the sun
And nothing is left except light on your fur--
There was the cat slopping its milk all day,
Fat cat, red tongue, green mind,
white milk
And August the most peaceful month.
To be, in the grass, in
the peacefullest time,
Without that monument of cat,
The cat forgotten on
the moon;
And to feel that the light is a rabbit-light
In which
everything is meant for you
And nothing need be explained;
Then there
is nothing to think of. It comes of itself;
And east rushes west and west
rushes down,
No matter. The grass is full
And full of yourself. The
trees around are for you,
The whole of the wideness of night is for you,
A
self that touches all edges,
You become a self that fills the four
corners of night.
The red cat hides away in the fur-light
And there you
are humped high, humped up,
You are humped higher and higher, black as
stone--
You sit with your head like a carving in space
And the little green
cat is a bug in the grass.
Valeri Kiesig
Fiction Exercise
Character Meets (Gasp) Plot!
Part 1:
Character
Begin by coming up with a list of character types that
relate to each other. Here are a few examples:
Mother and grown-up son
Estranged best friends
Auto mechanic and clueless customer
Hitchhiker and 70 year old woman
Ex-lovers (he’s still smitten) (she’s moved on)
Aerobics Instructor (female) and Male “student”
Suburban Mom and Lawn Care Professional
You can make these as specific or as vague as you
want. More specific suggestions
are fun for advanced students (i.e. two elderly women who were best friends
until their thirties and haven’t spoken since), and more vague suggestions are
easier for less advanced students (brothers).
Write each character relationship on a piece of
paper. Be sure to come up with
enough so that each student gets a different one.
Put these in a hat, and have students draw one.
Assign them to write a character sketch that shows us 1) who these people
are and 2) how they feel about each other.
Part 2:
Plot
Next you’ll come up with a list of what I’ll call
complicating factors. These are
things that might come up between the two people in the previous part of the
exercise, thus moving us from character sketch to actual plotted story. Here are some
examples:
A long-held secret
A large amount of money
A hiding place
A letter with surprising news
Again, write each of these on a piece of paper, and put
them in a hat. Have each student
draw one. Assign them to sketch
out a story in which the two characters they created in the previous section now
confront this complicating factor.
The story should center on the way in which this complication is revealed
and the way it affects and changes each character, especially in the way they
relate to each other.
and nouns at random from the list below, and pairing them up for a
strange, surreal poem. The challenge here is to break you from familiar pairings
of verbs and nouns. Too often we find ourselves using tired phrases: birds soar,
clocks strike, bulls charge, etc. Try something new.
After our warm-up we took a look at Wallace Stevens’ poem “A
Rabbit as King of the Ghosts”. This poem uses the 2nd person and steps into the
mind of a rabbit in the sleepy heat of August. A perfect poem for our season.
Stevens imagines a perfect day in the mind of a rabbit. The predators, if there
are any, are small and green. In response to Stevens we wrote our own poem in
the 2nd person where the “you” in the poem is a loved one. Imagine a perfect
day in the mind of someone you love and write about. For example if you were
writing about your cat, you might say: All the doors in the house are open /
your indecision is not a decision today / you sleep in a square of sunshine on
the floor / when you wake up your tail has never been so many species of mice.
Finally, we looked at a fiction prompt from author
Valerie Kiesig. This prompt asks
us to move from character sketches to plot. We first brainstormed a variety of
character relationships and then put these characters into a particular
situation (the more uncomfortable, the better). An example character
relationship I chose was ex-lovers – he’s still smitten, she’s moved on – until
she has a favor to ask of him. Is it a chance to rekindle the relationship? Or
will he be a schmuck for the rest of his life?
A Noun Verbing Emergency!
Pick 6 verbs and 6 nouns. Write a poem that uses one verb and one
noun per line in the most surprising ways you can think. Start your poem with
some kind of an emergency. The things that happen next are what you do to fix
the emergency. (Of course, maybe it won’t work!) After you do six, come up with
your own strange verb/noun combination.
Example:
I had lost my mind so
I gassed the ocean with my armpits
I buttered the cockroach
I undid the birthday cake from the calendar
but
my mind was still willynilly in the rafters
I zipped the dingo into a necklace
I wiped the planet clean with my elbow
I blasted the omelet
I planted the queen in the asteroid belt
and still my mind was illogical in a saddle bag
so now what will I do?
Verbs
nail
churn
skip
tickled
plant
yodel
rope
blast
discover
hold
whip
chew
gas
welcome
torch
assume
zip
trot
pounce
paint
wipe
sing
click
gum
pluck
rule
milk
undo
echo
vacuum
knock
label
scrub
hatch
miss
bug
black
trace
crunch
inspect
glimpse
ogle
ruin
break
Nouns
pineapple
pony
glove
whale
cowboy
xray
quail
puppy
zebra
xylophone
custard
caboose
lollipop
dingo
sandwich
bicycle
pine tree
television
Uncle Rothko
nightlight
cannibal
birthday cake
elephant
planet
pick-up truck
backpack
needle
measuring tape
Queen
dragon’s tail
rainbow
angel
robin
Easter egg
Christmas Tree
shopping center
hamburger
oil spill
hurricane
birthmark
cockroach
ice cube
A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts
by Wallace Stevens
The difficulty to think at the end of day,
When the shapeless
shadow covers the sun
And nothing is left except light on your fur--
There was the cat slopping its milk all day,
Fat cat, red tongue, green mind,
white milk
And August the most peaceful month.
To be, in the grass, in
the peacefullest time,
Without that monument of cat,
The cat forgotten on
the moon;
And to feel that the light is a rabbit-light
In which
everything is meant for you
And nothing need be explained;
Then there
is nothing to think of. It comes of itself;
And east rushes west and west
rushes down,
No matter. The grass is full
And full of yourself. The
trees around are for you,
The whole of the wideness of night is for you,
A
self that touches all edges,
You become a self that fills the four
corners of night.
The red cat hides away in the fur-light
And there you
are humped high, humped up,
You are humped higher and higher, black as
stone--
You sit with your head like a carving in space
And the little green
cat is a bug in the grass.
Valeri Kiesig
Fiction Exercise
Character Meets (Gasp) Plot!
Part 1:
Character
Begin by coming up with a list of character types that
relate to each other. Here are a few examples:
Mother and grown-up son
Estranged best friends
Auto mechanic and clueless customer
Hitchhiker and 70 year old woman
Ex-lovers (he’s still smitten) (she’s moved on)
Aerobics Instructor (female) and Male “student”
Suburban Mom and Lawn Care Professional
You can make these as specific or as vague as you
want. More specific suggestions
are fun for advanced students (i.e. two elderly women who were best friends
until their thirties and haven’t spoken since), and more vague suggestions are
easier for less advanced students (brothers).
Write each character relationship on a piece of
paper. Be sure to come up with
enough so that each student gets a different one.
Put these in a hat, and have students draw one.
Assign them to write a character sketch that shows us 1) who these people
are and 2) how they feel about each other.
Part 2:
Plot
Next you’ll come up with a list of what I’ll call
complicating factors. These are
things that might come up between the two people in the previous part of the
exercise, thus moving us from character sketch to actual plotted story. Here are some
examples:
A long-held secret
A large amount of money
A hiding place
A letter with surprising news
Again, write each of these on a piece of paper, and put
them in a hat. Have each student
draw one. Assign them to sketch
out a story in which the two characters they created in the previous section now
confront this complicating factor.
The story should center on the way in which this complication is revealed
and the way it affects and changes each character, especially in the way they
relate to each other.
Drop-in Workshop (Online) July 5, 2011
Tonight at the Drop-In Workshop we will be working on a few different prompts. Writers are invited to adapt any prompt to either fiction or poetry. I usually introduce these ideas as poems, but many times there is a story waiting inside of a poem.
Our first prompt involves definitions:
Choose an ordinary object, such as a door, then make up a list of functions for that object. Try to select functions that lend a symbolic meaning or quality to the object. For example, a door opens, closes, locks, blocks the view, separates inside from outside, etc. When you have created the list, begin the poem with the object and then follow that with a series of functions selected from your original list. Select the functions with an eye toward some larger insight or theme, and structure the poem in the following sequence: 1. title and subject, 2. the list of functions, and 3. a summary statement.
(“The fill-in-the-blanks or Definition Poem” by Jack Myers, published in The Practice of Poetry, Behn & Twichell, editors)
For this definition poem we will be reading a poem/definition from Dan Beachy-Quick’s A Whaler’s Dictionary. The purpose of this exercise is to allow you to experiment with symbol and metaphor. Objects in stories and poems are not merely there as decorations. Given enough observation they take on meaning well beyond themselves.
II. I have always imagined that if there were a heaven it would be a giant summer bbq and all my friends from all over the world would be there. With that in mind, the second piece we will be working on involves the names of people we have known. Taking our inspiration from “The Names” by Billy Collins and Carley Moore’s “My Friends and Enemies”, we will write a poem that records and reflects upon the different people who have touched our lives and invent a landscape where they can all be found. This poem might inspire you to model a short story character on someone from your past.
