Peggy told us it was time we started making up our own prompts. Our homework assignment for tomorrow is to write down an assignment on a slip of paper. (I think I can see where this is going.) In class, she had us write something repeating one of two phrases: I can’t understand or I never understood.
David had us read our direct and indirect conversations from last week. Our homework is to write a third version with no more than 2 lines of dialog.
Jeanne read us a poem in the persona of John Muir, all one sentence. (Peggy suggested we write a one-sentence poem of about the same length–considerable. For homework, we have to find a character from myth or a fairy tale. Our class exercise was to write on “What formed you.” It could be an incident, a landscape, peaple, creatures, experience, trauma, food, institutions, work, play…
Afternoon we spent with those people only taking the single class. Peggy, I don’t have notes on what you did–please comment. David quoted from Flannery O’Conner about mystery and manners being the essential points of a story. He had us invert characters (age, gender, jog, favorite item of clothing, favorite food, contents of refrigerator, the worst thing they’ve ever said, and a secret. Then we had to copy it and excnage extra copies with others in the class, so each had two characters. Finally, write a conversation between the two, starting with “I have to get this off my chest.” Only he kept changing where the conversation was to take place–speeding car, Alaskan woods, inn a very slow drivethrough lane at McDonald’s, in a library with homeless min sitting near the water fountain. The idea was that the setting would change the nature of the conversation.
Finally, Jeanne gave us the poem, “Bike Ride with Older Boys” by Laura Kasischke. She then had us write down several things we hadn’t done, pick one at random, and write about it.
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In case Peggy doesn’t see this – she had us do an exercise on ‘what formed you (or your character)?’ – ‘what made you who you are?’ We read a poem by Peggy, ‘What Made Me,’ and a short prose piece ‘Confession,’ by Stuart Dybek, published in the anthology ‘Short Takes,’ to get us started.
Thanks again for doing this!
Ela
Thanks, Ela!
Writing assignment:
Take your character (or yourself) back 10 years. Let her have a conversation with herself. What would the older one warn her younger self about? What would the younger one remind her older self about that she’s forgotten?
Try it again, from only 5 years ago.
Here the assignment or prompt we were to concoct:
In the persona of a homeless person, write a poem or prose piece about authorities cleaning out homeless camps.
War’s End – 2
by Marie Lundstrom
“The war’s over!” we shouted,
with the radio voices,
at home on the farms,
on the school bus.
But hard times came
anyway.
“It’s all the Jews’ fault!”
one farmer neighbor said.
I used to trust him.
But not any more.
Aubade
by Marie Lundstrom
The swamp frog chorus
unquiets the night,
a dark murmurous comfort
for our sleep after love.
I slide awake,
clutch your encircling arm,
smooth, brown, warm–Apache, you said,
not like my freckled Scandinavian white.
The rooster will call soon,
and the frogs will simmer their voices.
Dad will head for the barn,
called by responsibility–heavy udders of placid cows,
meows of hungry cats.
Slip out my window, love,
past the guardianship of white ears.
Walk softly to your pickup
hidden under indifferent trees.
Silent, now. Mom must not hear
your secret passage.
But hold me close before
the mountain edges are laced with light
across the valley, and I hear
one last whip-poor-will.
When you get to your pickup,
dawn will let you hear the welcoming larks.
And I’ll shiver in my chilled bed.
Writing Prompts for Peggy’s assignment:
from Don Gray:
1. List 3 seasons
2. List 3 places on earth you know well
3. List 3 friends & 3 relatives & 3 celebrities
4. PICK one only from each list, add a juicy ripe peach OR a new red Mustang convertible as an Evocative Detail, and WRITE!
************************************
from Bonny Lynn Babb:
Describe one person–physically, emotionally. Identify their assets and faults. Have the person ready to meet a new person.
Peggy’s assignment: “What Made You?”.
Write about what helped make you who you are, what you are, what affected you. Give it a title.
Growing, Door by Door by Door
Knocking on doors, house to house, offering homedwellers the opportunity to buy a compact disk of Cloverine Brand Salve, its careful medicinal powers and pleasant perfume packed in a convenient flat metal can with a white clover displayed on top, became natural to me at nine years of age. Whether anyone bought a can or not was very important for the tally of points needed to win a genuine 8″ plastic weather station, complete with Swiss farm maiden who pivoted out on sunshiny days but remained inside when cloudy or rainy. It mattered to me.
I met many prospective customers yet sold almost no cans of salve. My grandmother’s closet ended up with several years supply of ointment. However it gave me a precious skill: do not fear meeting strangers on their doorsteps; feel secure in the territory of others. Believe that you are prepared to face the world.
Don, have you read Paul Harding’s ‘Tinkers?’ – it’s an amazing little novel, gorgeously imagined. Your piece here brought it to mind.
Peggy’s Assignment: Either “I Can’t Understand” or “I Never Understood” combined with Descriptive Responses to the landscape paintings, compressed to a Post Card. **************************************************
I can’t understand why my reunion classmates dream nightmares of illegal aliens, welfare queens and abortionists preying on their granddaughters, horrific visions spawned by talking heads from urban canyons. Yet I have only to gaze at the serenity of mountains, see the Chatanika flowing past a solitary burnt spruce standing sentinel watch to find the key. Floating down the river timeless, paddles dripping at midnight, the sky still gold and peach with purple, my guard is for the lurking stump. Perhaps a bear will come crashing through the shallows? Why worry of shadows cast at night while Nature waits patiently to soothe?
.
.
Writing Prompt:
I posed a love poem that never used the work “love.” Try the same thing but pick a different, emotion-laden word, like “fear” or “birth” or “death.”
Puzzlements
I can’t understand what it feels like to be a bird, flying.
I can’t understand how a watercolorist can recreate the world from flowing water.
I can’t understand why people profess one thing, and do quite another–but I am guilty myself.
I can’t understand how it feels to be a dog, or a cat, or a horse–but I can imagine it, and write from that perspective, always remembering that the voice I choose is only my idea of what the world might look like to another creature.
I can’t understand what death is like.
I can’t understand many things–but I am comfortable with the fact that I can’t always know. My sister is not. She has to have certainty. Right now it is the King James Bible, which to my mind is far less dangerous than the spiritualism she once embraced. I wonder how many religious fundamentalists, be they Taliban or intolerant church members, have the same need for absolute knowledge.
Jeanne’s Assignment (after reading Bike Ride with Older Boys): Write of an Event you did or did not do and add a title.
.
Not Flying to Seattle to track down four young men and kill them.
Incident at the Mall North of Campus–1991
When my daughter was seventeen and a half and a freshman at the University of Washington, she was shopping at a small mall north of the campus wearing her old Lathrop High School letter jacket. She was looking for an ATM machine near a telephone booth at the far end of the lot when a car with four young men pulled up. Two began to walk toward her. She tried the dead phone and went quickly into a supermarket when it became apparent they were coming toward her not the phone.
Then another one also came out of the car and the three descended into the market, searching the rows. She ducked down in the back of the store behind potted plants in the floral department and scurried to slip out a side door and into the next shop. she escaped the area and somehow fled back to the campus and her dormitory, shaken. After speaking with the R.A. of her dorm floor, she decided to contact the police and met with a plainclothes officer the next day. He told her that they had already been caught and not to get involved, to avoid any possible contact with those four young men, so she reluctantly let it drop. She called and left a long narrative about the frightening encounter on our phone later in the day.
In the Seattle Post-Intelligencer that day was a brief story of a rape-murder victim in Seattle north of the University District two miles from the campus. Her dismembered body was found wrapped only in her letter jacket.
.
That is really stirring, Don – chilling, actually – I love how the detail of the jacket ‘wraps’ the narrative as well as the victim. The intensity of the closeness and also the distancing.
Hi Don,
This crafted description grabs me at a primal level (protecting our young) as I think it did you. I have a daughter about five years younger than yours who chose to go to school in L.A.. She is half Inupiaq, raised in Fairbanks. It was a difficult time for Dad, knowing what I did about the world, needing to allow her her independence. You’ve done a great job of capturing that anxiety.
Assignments/Prompts:
1) Pick a limerick, nonsense verse or nursery rhyme (or make up your own). Then, tell the story (or back story) form the point of view of one of the characters/participants.
NB: The black sheep in ‘Baa baa black sheep’ needn’t be a literal sheep, and the story of ‘Ring around the rosie’ needn’t be about the plague – you have a free hand.
2) Write a short piece (poetry or prose) that uses _no adjectives_ but that uses onomatopoeic sound effects. (Cf. Steve’s ‘thunks.’)
Assignment: Personify a certain food and write the poem/prose in the form of a walk.
Here are three prompts:
1. Pick an object and write about an event from its eyes.
2. Pick at least 3 compass directions and end every line/sentence with one of them.
3. Construct each line/sentence you write with an even number of words. When finished, divide the first line/sentence exactly in half and insert any word from the “z” section of the dictionary. Continue in reverse alphabetical order (z-a) with each line/sentence.
I need to insert a note here for prompt #1. It comes from my high school English class and was evidently effective for at least one student, as I still remember the poem she student wrote.
Assignment: Create the most outrageous autobiography you can using “facts” that are only partially presented (half truths), taken out of context, or could be followed by “yes, but …”
Example: From 1985 to present, I was in and out of the State Correctional Facility in Fairbanks. (Yes, but as a programs volunteer.)
Get creative.
Hi Sue Ann and Festivalies! Here is my assignment to share. I’ve used this in my classroom, but it works for all age groups. I collect old calendars and save the pictures. I cut them apart, laminate and keep these in a folder. Randomly hand these out to inspire students with an instant subject to write about. It also is nice to file as themes, such as animals, nature, etc. if you want to. Happy trails! Mare
Prompt idea:
Take someone close to you and still alive, i.e. mom or dad, or sibling, and write a eulogy for that person
Sue Ann,
Thank you for posting your poem Lovesong. Could you also post the other piece you presented at the reading in Schaible?
Thank you for all you shared with us during Festival — zucchini, poetry, prose, encouragement to post!
Kim