Writing Prompt, July 21: Portraits of Place

Sontag writes, in Susan Sontag Reborn: Journals & Notebooks 1947-1963

"Athens would make a good setting for a story--about foreigners, traveling. It has lots of clear-cut and attractive props.

The plump American queens of Athens, the dusty streets filled with construction work, bouzouki bands in the taverna gardens at night, eating plates of thick yoghourt and sliced tomatoes and small green peas and drinking resinated wine, the huge Cadillac taxis, middle-aged men walking or sitting in the park fingering their amber beads, the roasted corn sellers sitting on street corners by their braziers, the Greek sailors in their tight white pants and wide black sashes, strawberry sunsets behind the hills of Athens seen from the Acropolis, old men in the streets sitting by their scales who offer to weigh you for one drachma--"

Go into town or the city and make a list of the "clear-cut and attractive prompts" around you.

Writing Prompt, july 19: Bathing

Write about the bathing suits of your life.

Writing Prompt, July 18: Reunion

Write about a summer family reunion. You might want to use a line from the poem below to get started.

Family Reunion

The divorced mother and her divorcing
daughter. The about-to-be ex-son-in-law
and the ex-husband's adopted son.
The divorcing daughter's child, who is

the step-nephew of the ex-husband's
adopted son. Everyone cordial:
the ex-husband's second wife
friendly to the first wife, warm

to the divorcing daughter's child's
great-grandmother, who was herself
long ago divorced. Everyone
grown used to the idea of divorce

Almost everyone has separated
from the landscape of childhood.
Collections of people in cities
are divorced from clean air and stars.

Toddlers in day care are parted
from working parents, schoolchildren
from the assumption of unbloodied
daylong safety. Old people die apart

from all they've gathered over time,
and in strange beds. Adults
grow estranged from a God
evidently divorced from history;

most are cut off from their own
histories, each of which waits
like a child left at day care.
What if you turned back for a moment

and put your arms around yours?
Yes, you might be late for work;
no, your history doesn't smell sweet
like a toddler's head. But look

at those small round wrists,
that short-legged, comical walk.
Caress your history—who else will?
Promise to come back later.

Pay attention when it asks you
simple questions: Where are we going?
Is it scary? What happened? Can
I have more now? Who is that?


by Jeredith Merrin
Bat Ode
The University of Chicago Press

Writing Prompt, July 17: On a Walk

Take a walk and look for animals. Sit outside and write about what you see.

Writing Prompt, July 15: In a Garden

Sit in a garden and write. What do you hear, smell, see? What's crawling on the earth? Observe the sunlight on the plants. Feel their leaves.

". . . I have salvaged dead wood from the grove of trees behind the flower bed, have made a crude bench from this. I sit there and I look at the cascade of Sweet Briar Rose, at the brush of lavender, and I try to imagine the Saffron crocus growing between them.

"I have cleared the tangle of trees above the flower bed so that now the sun moves over the garden. I can see where it falls, what it touches. There are blackbirds calling from the woods."

from The Lost Garden, by Helen Humphreys

Writing Prompt, July 14: Traveling

Write about a summer trip you took when you were a child. I am the bonneted baby on my grandmother's lap and don't remember waiting for this flight. I think I'll write about it anyway.

Writing prompt, July 13. A July birthday

Write about a July birthday--consider writing about somebody you don't know. Or maybe it's the birthday of one of your characters. Every July, there is a four-day gathering at Walden Pond to celebrate Thoreau's birthday. The Thoreau Society was founded in 1941, making it the oldest society devoted to an American author. It's also the largest. Thoreau wrote, "I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours." (From the Writer's Almanac, July 12)

Writing Prompt, July 12:

Write about poison ivy, red ants, ticks, bed bugs, mosquitos, chiggers, or . . .

Writing Prompt, July 11: Is it safe . . .

Prompt: "Is it safe to go back in the water?"

Writing Prompt, July 10: A Favorite Book

Prompt: Write about a favorite summer read from childhood. What did you love about the book? Where did you read? In a hammock, on a porch, under the sheet at night with a flashlight?

Writing Prompt, July 9: Watermelon

Prompt: List everything you can think of about watermelon--words, phrases. Don't think. Just write.

Writing Prompt, July 8: Warm Weather Rock

Prompt: Think about a song that celebrates summer and write.

For me, first up is "Hot Town, Summer in the City," by the Lovin' Spoonful and that steamy July back in 1966.

Hot town, summer in the city
Back of my neck getting dirty and gritty
Been down, isn't it a pity
Doesn't seem to be a shadow in the city . . .

Writing Prompt, July 7: Step Onto the Ferry

Prompt: Write about taking a summer ferry ride.

I love this opening from Step Onto the Ferry, and Summer Begins

The piece by Lili Wright appeared in the Sunday "Travel Section," when the New York Times still offered a back-page travel essay.

Without a doubt, ferries are my favorite way to travel. I would take a ferry to California if I could. I would take a ferry to France.

Sure, ferries are slow and heavy. They can be rusty and cranky and can grunt when you least expect it. They have dirty windows and plastic seats without cushions. Ferries are the frumpy, weak-coffee serving, wiener-roasting rec rooms of transport, but I prefer them to any other means.

A ferry trip feels like a clean beginning, an ending to whatever happened before. As you leave land behind, you also leave behind that worn-out, crusty you who had lost her sense of humor and possibly her grace. . .

Summer Prompt, July 6: Overheard

Prompt: Write an overheard dialogue between two people sitting out on a screened porch on a hot July night. Set this up by introducing the reader to who is eavesdropping and why? Where is the listening during this overheard conversation?

Writing Prompt, July 5 Summer heat

Prompt: Pick a line or a word or an idea from this poem and use it as your starting point.

A Warm Summer in San Francisco

Although I watched and waited for it every day,
somehow I missed it, the moment when everything reached
the peak of ripeness. It wasn't at the solstice; that was only
the time of the longest light. It was sometime after that, when
the plants had absorbed all that sun, had taken it into themselves
for food and swelled to the height of fullness. It was in July,
in a dizzy blaze of heat and fog, when on some nights
it was too hot to sleep, and the restaurants set half their tables
on the sidewalks; outside the city, down the coast,
the Milky Way floated overhead, and shooting stars
fell from the sky over the ocean. One day the garden
was almost overwhelmed with fruition:
My sweet peas struggled out of the raised bed onto the mulch
of laurel leaves and bark and pods, their brilliantly colored
sunbonnets of rose and stippled pink, magenta and deep purple
pouring out a perfume that was almost oriental. Black-eyed Susans
stared from the flower borders, the orange cherry tomatoes
were sweet as candy, the fruit fattened in its swaths of silk,
hummingbirds spiraled by in pairs, the bees gave up
and decided to live in the lavender. At the market,
surrounded by black plums and rosy plums and sugar prunes
and white-fleshed peaches and nectarines, perfumey melons
and mangos, purple figs in green plastic baskets,
clusters of tiny Champagne grapes and piles of red-black cherries
and apricots freckled and streaked with rose, I felt tears
come into my eyes, absurdly, because I knew
that summer had peaked and was already passing
away. I felt very close then to understanding
the mystery; it seemed to me that I almost knew
what it meant to be alive, as if my life had swelled
to some high moment of response, as if I could
reach out and touch the season, as if I were inside
its body, surrounded by sweet pulp and juice,
shimmering veins and ripened skin.

by Carolyn Miller, from Light, Moving. © Sixteen Rivers Press, 2009

Writing Prompt, July 4:

Write about a struggle you've had--or are having--with dependency.

Writing Prompt, July 3: Summer Camp

Write about summer camp.

If you didn't go to camp, pretend you did and write about that. Or make up a story about somebody who did go.

I found a letter in my childhood keepsake box, "my treasures," addressed to my older sister Nancy and me, from our friend Dodie Pettit, about being at overnight camp:

Please excuse my writing because I am on my bed. This is rest hour. Carol -- I hope you can read script. . .Tonight the Iroquois are going to put on a tribe show. I don't know what it is because I'm a Mohegan and it's a secret.

Thursday our cabin (cabin 7) canoed to Trigger Island for a cookout. We went skinny dipping and tipped the canoes. . .



Dodie has drawn a tiny map in the letter. You might want to create a map of a camp or a camp trail and write about that.

Writing Prompt, July 16: Sorrows

"All sorrows can be borne if you tell a story about them."
Karen Blixen

Write about a summer sorrow.

Writing Prompt, July 2: A Summer Word

Pick a word that captures a feeling of summer. Write about it. Here's something I wrote in a prompt workshop. Some of you have heard it. My word: Dawdle

Dawdle:

I watch the two little bodies walking down the beach at the water’s edge where the sand is cooler. I can see their shoulders held back, proud of their solo mission, big girls off alone without an adult. As they blur and become dots in the mirage of summer heat, I gaze farther down the beach at their destination, the little gray shingle box of a store, its blue postage size flag rippling.

I imagine their joy at entering that odd little room with its saggy wooden floors, the screen door that slaps shut, and its short shelves holding only the necessities—a few tubes of toothpaste, the package of Oreos, Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom soup, paper towel. And at the far end, the magical Mary Poppinsish penny candy counter with glass jars of Mary Jane’s, Hershey Kisses, Reese’s cups, candy cigarettes, Tootsie Rolls and Airheads.

Before they left I reapplied sun screen to their freckled pink faces, insisted they wear long tee-shirts over their swim suits, tucked their salty hair behind their ears, and plopped their pastel baseball caps on their fair heads. Each girl clutched a quarter in her fist.

They will return, waving their little brown bags of melting chocolates and sticky wax papered treats.

My last words to them, these little girls aged eight and five, after promising a swim when they get back, the last words I say to them are, “Don’t dawdle.”

T-shirt Truth

I saw this T-shirt at a street fair in Cambridge, MA, last weekend--part of the first annual Dance For World Community Festival. The festival was organized by the Jose Mateo Ballet Theatre and is a project dedicated to expanding the role of dance in local communities. Along with all the tasty food, the festival featured lots of dance groups--from African dance to modern to ballet--and free classes in many dance forms.



I felt like I was stepping into the past, into an era when street theater ruled and community involvement in the arts mattered. I was also stepping into my own past, when I was a modern dancer rehearsing and performing in Cambridge and then New York.

Write about something that really mattered once and doesn't anymore.