1. What were you taught to value and aspire to as a writer? What canonical authors & works were you taught to revere?

2. What people and/or institutions influence your work, and how does it show up in your writing?

3. Of these, what beliefs or conventions do you not resonate with, and want to unlearn?

Prompt #116: Share a couple of your favorite lines from your current work-in-progress.

I wish our mothers
Knew how
To celebrate their own bodies
So that they could celebrate
The robust curves and soft edges
I'd grow into

Prompt #115: What was the last book you read? What was its essential truth and did it challenge or affirm your own? BONUS: Did you learn anything that helped you with your writing?

Say Anything (Or On the Reasonableness of Considering Deicide)

Time is a solar flare, a mad corona, a demon halo,
a locked bedroom door, a decorative glass knob
the size of a baseball, born to burn
and splitting light. Time is caught, when you think about it, in the same way color dances

on the surface of a diamond, eyes deciding
to be or not to be witnesses
the nervous endings
of lashes
splayed about like tiny fingers
reaching for the almond of your eye.

Through a narrow tunnel of white Timmy asks,
Do you want to follow the creek-root down to the lagoon?
Maybe he means “route”. Between us I’m the one that
obsesses about, choosing the perfect word

like a shield, like a red-hot needle, like the act
of one person cracking
their knuckles
is the opposite of two people holding hands.

Time is the heavy
back of my Father’s hand.
Time is the cold
unflinching stare of my Mother’s eyes.

Her favorite thing to whisper,
stay silent or say nothing but what I’ve taught you to say.

Right now I am unmaking myself again
hiding in the silent black worrisome silence
of my tiny closet behind a pressboard chest of drawers
praying

the two other people in the house are asleep. Yesterday,
in the pressboard chest of drawers in my mind, silently,
I nicknamed my Mother The Angel of Winter and my Father Moby Dick. My plan is to wait
until tomorrow to breathe out loud or move.

From the walkie-talkie on the floor next to me
maybe, just maybe, I imagine Timmy whispering,

Paulie, Paulie, do you think you could write a poem
that conjures up the Devil or sneaks into Heaven and puts an end to God?

Balled in a corner of closet
(repeatedly spelling out the word terror
under my breath like a miserere or a code)
pressing the walkie switch off
I wonder, feckless, spineless, idle, and useless,
who are the all in all alone?

Prompt #113: Write out a hazy memory you have. Then fill in the gaps with newly created details… nobody will ever know!! 🤫

In Lisbon during my study abroad semester, living it up like a real-life Hemingway... if Hemingway were a neurotic college kid with a penchant for overthinking everything. Anyway, it's another night out and the wine is flowing, like…wine and I’m starting to feel like a local.

I stumble into a Portuguese gal and we start chatting, and to my surprise, I'm suddenly fluent. I'm stringing together words like I'm giving a TED talk and she’s hanging onto my every word. 

Next day, raging headache. Could barely squawk out my breakfast order without pausing to consult my phrasebook. Bless that woman’s heart.

Prompt #113: How does brute force show up in your (protagonist’s) life? Whether it manifests as aggression, persistence, or strength, what are the circumstances? What is it trying to achieve and how’s it going?

When my heart pounded fast with the last fever I’d ever have, I told myself, “No, you won’t die. Inhale, exhale.” I clung to that lifeline. The first breath would lead to the next, to the next, and in that way, I would stave off death forever. Still, holding on to even a lifeline takes energy, which I lost first over the course of days, then hours, until finally “inhale, exhale” became my only thought. But no giving up. Never. My chest rose and fell, the movements more imperceptible each time, as I waited for the day I woke up, covered in sweat but alive all the same.

A true artist learns the rules to break them and build something new. Otherwise, the person is merely a practitioner.