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 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.

_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.”

1. Pick a bird.
2. You are in that bird’s egg.
3. 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.)
4. 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?
5. Write your way out (devise some inventive way of escaping your egg).
6. Make up a title for your piece.

I really like this prompt because the metaphor and symbolism is so implicit; you don’t even have to think about it. It just hatches on its own!

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.

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
 

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.

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…

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.

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.