Today’s writing prompt is inspired by Poetic Medicine by John Fox, Infusing our poems with what nature teaches us: A forest fire is awesome and frightening but clears the forest floor for new growth. Metaphors and poetic images of earth can often express such feelings better than plain descriptive words, which seem to crack under the pressure of deep feeling. Feelings of grief might bring to mind images of winter’s coldness. Pablo Neruda crystalizes a wintry grief image: Yes: seed germs, and grief, and everything that throbs frightened in the crackling January light will ripen, will burn, as the fruit burned ripe. The insights we gain by observing nature, and the poems we make which include these insights, help us cope with our rage, grief and pain. The poetry of earth offers us a chance to experience something more about life than our self-definition and ordinary language usually permit. Like…
Manifest with Brad Yates
Today’s Guest Blogger is Brad Yates. In Manifestation 101 (& Taking Likely Action) Brad talks about a five-step process for manifesting what you really want. 1. Create It 2. Clear It 3. Live It 4. Let Go 5. Likely Action Step One: Create It Decide what you really want. Write it down. Start with something like: “I am so happy! I have . . .” Then list the qualities and features of what it is you want (as if you already have them). It’s important that you write it in the present. If you write “I want this,” then you are vibrating at a frequency of want – and the wanting of it is what you will continue to attract. You want to be vibrating in harmony with already having it. Write positive things, stating the positive aspect (what it has), rather than what it doesn’t have. If you write, “My…
Paint a word picture. Prompt #450
Paint a word picture about anything you want, perhaps something that happened over the weekend, or during this past week. Or, paint a word picture of what you look like to others. Or write about what you experienced (saw, heard, felt, sensed) during a walk. Write about your garden. Or a community garden. Or a public garden. Just Write!
Joy School
Elizabeth Berg creates characters so lovable you want them to solve their problems and live happily ever after. Joy School’s Katie is adorable. Her growing pains are palpable and yet she carries on with admirable determination. Berg’s story endings are satisfying, leaving the reader hopeful for a better future and an improved world. Excerpted from the end of Joy School: “Now a cold wind blows suddenly, pushes my hair across my face and I get to see everything in slats. I put my hands deep in my pockets, find Jimmy’s stone. I take it out and look at it. It’s a pretty thing . . . I put the stone against my face, right where he touched me. And then I fling it far out into the pond. . . I didn’t mean to throw it. I wish I hadn’t done that. I’m cold. I start for home. Winter will…
The Author Blog
Do you wonder if you should have a blog? If you have a blog, are you happy with how that’s going? The Author Blog: Easy Blogging for Busy Authors by Anne R. Allen contains clear, concise, succinct information to guide you in the blogging process. Anne explains: How an author blog differs from a business blog. What authors should and shouldn’t blog. Choosing the topics for your genre and audience. How blogging can build your platform. And much more, including topics most of us don’t think about, like what happens to your blog when you die? Myths and Realities about Blogging. Lots to learn and ponder about blogging.
Mudlark
Mudlark was founded in 1995 as an electronic journal of poetry & poetics. It has an ISSN (International Standard Serial Number) from the Library of Congress; is refereed, copyrighted, and archived. Mudlark is “never in and never out of print.” To submit or not to submit? Take a good look at Mudlark. Spend some time on the Mudlark website. Find out what issues, posters, and flashes are. Then make your decision. As our full name, Mudlark: An Electronic Journal of Poetry & Poetics, suggests, we will consider accomplished work that locates itself anywhere on the spectrum of contemporary practice. We want poems, of course, but we want essays, too, that make us read poems (and write them?) differently somehow. Although we are not innocent, we do imagine ourselves capable of surprise. Mudlark publishes in three formats: “issues” are the electronic equivalent of print chapbooks; “posters” are the electronic equivalent of print broadsides; and “flashes” are poems that have news in…
A Scar . . . Prompt #449
Write about a scar. Could be a scar you have. A scar you have seen. A scar on Mother Earth. Could be an emotional scar. Write about a scar from someone else’s point of view . . . someone who caused the accident, caused the scar, was bewitched or repelled by the scar. Or write from the point of view of the scar.
FAD: Feeling-Action-Dialogue
Today’s guest blogger is Nancy Julien Kopp. Her blog, Writer Granny’s World features tips and treats about writing. Her brilliant August 20, 2019 post (excerpt below) focused on how to use action with dialogue. Fingers flying across keyboard, Marlene types, “On with the show, Nancy.” How to show action when writing dialogue. I see writers putting action after dialogue. That’s backwards. Examples of action with dialogue. A. “Stop that!” Sally slapped his hand from her arm. B. Sally slapped his hand from her arm. “Stop that!” C. “Stop that!” Sally said. Sally slapped his hand from her arm. Which is the best? The worst? I think B is best. And C is the worst. In B, we see the action, then hear the words that go with it. In A, would Sally say the words, then slap his hand away? Note from Marlene: This would be a “delayed reaction.” Sally…
Infuse Your Writing With Earth Imagery . . . Prompt #448
Excerpt from Poetic Medicine, by John Fox, “Giving Yourself Permission to be Wild and Magnificent” Earth offers us powerful images and metaphors with which to tell our stories. Rather than thinking of the earth’s resources as commodities like oil and wood . . . consider the more intangible qualities which nature offers us, such as beauty and spectacle, turmoil and order, mystery and predictability. A sense of beauty – wild and terrible or lovely and breathtaking – can be healing. Infusing your writing with earth imagery will help reveal your unique voice and imagination. The stories of earth – and our stories – are interwoven, constantly changing in the cyclic process of birth, growth and death. A language for expressing these deep changes in your life can be found by tuning to the language of the earth. Poem-making and the natural world give you permission to be wild and magnificent….
The Write Spot: Memories
Marlene Cullen’s collection of short essays compiled in The Write Spot: Memories unfolds like a gently-made, multi-colored origami box. Each story is its only piece, its own regretful, loving, confusing, humorous, illuminating tale, yet held together by one theme that touches us all—our fathers and our memories of them when we were children, and our awakenings about them as we became adults. The Write Spot: Memories is for anyone who has had a father—whether present or absent, loving or distant, authoritarian or goofball. Authentic and relatable, each story is written with deep insight and love. —Julie Wilder-Sherman I love this book and the way it encourages, instructs and gives writers practical ideas to keep on writing. The stories are captivating and written from the heart. Each author ends with an honest description of their Inner Critic and how they tame it! I read this book twice because of the honest…