Prompt for the Week: 4/27/20 Write about the hands you know better than your own. (from @brooklynwriterscollective on Instagram)

A Poem for You: Testimony: 1968 by Rita Dove Who comforts you now that the wheel has broken? No more princes for the poor. Loss whittling you thin. Grief is the constant now, hope the last word spoken. In a dance of two elegies, which circles the drain? A token year with its daisies and carbines is where we begin. Who comforts you now? That the wheel has broken is Mechanics 101; to keep dreaming when the joke’s on you? Well, crazier legends have been written. Grief is the constant now; hope, the last word spoken on a motel balcony, shouted [...]

Prompt for the Week 4/13/20 “Caught in the rain today, I recall that couple kissing and holding each other infinitely close in the rain one dark evening under the nearly invisible trees,” wrote Paul Valéry in 1910, in a notebook included in The Idea of Perfection: The Poetry of Paul Valéry, translated from the French by Nathaniel Rudavsky-Brody and forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux this month. Draw inspiration from rainy scenes in poetry such as William Carlos Williams’s “Spring Storm,” Sara Teasdale’s “There Will Come Soft Rains,” and Emily Dickinson’s “Like Rain it sounded till it curved” and write a poem [...]

Instructions on Not Giving Up Ada Limón - 1976- More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees that really gets to me. When all the shock of white and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath, the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin growing over whatever winter did to us, a return to the strange idea of continuous living despite the [...]

Prompt for the Week 4/6/20 “I have to remind myself that the possibility of everything ending up okay is no more outlandish than any worst-case scenario I can conjure,” writes Lilly Dancyger in her essay “My Book Comes Out Next Year. Do I Even Still Believe in Next Year?” at Electric Literature. “If I can imagine a post-apocalyptic wasteland, I tell myself, I should also be able to imagine something like stability.” While acknowledging the precariousness of making plans during this uncertain time, write a personal essay about your hopes for next year. What comes to mind when you allow for [...]

Prompt for the Week of 3/30/20 Take a few minutes to wander through your home, trying to see it anew, as if you were a stranger passing through. What strikes your eye? Look even closer at objects, at art you’ve stopped looking at. Make a list of things you see anew. Then choose one and write about the way in which it speaks of you and to you. What memories does it contain? What might it reveal to a stranger’s eye? You can apply this prompt to a fictional character as well. This comes from #porchprompt on Instagram

Prompt for the Week of 3/23/20 (from Poets and Writers) “I sometimes find talking about a piece of visual art can help illuminate certain abstract ideas,” says Jessi Jezewska Stevens, author of the debut novel, The Exhibition of Persephone Q (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020), in a BOMB magazine interview by Kristina Tate. “I am drawn to visual art as a tool of writing about perception and the fragility of perception.” Take a cue from Stevens’s way of connecting writing and visual art, and write a lyric essay inspired by a particular painting or work of art that you find resonant. [...]