I am writing to you after waking up from a 3 hour nap. After an early AM flight, I’m finally back home after the whirlwind of a week that is my MFA residency. Diminishing sleep coupled with maximizing its final days meant Creative Juice fell on the back-burner, but better late than never!

The brilliant Patrick Madden taught my workshop Experiments in Non-Fiction. I left the week with a newfound love for experimental forms and a gnawing irreverence for the arbitrary limits of genre, punctuation, and grammar. It appears I’ve dipped into the rule breaking phase of honing my craft and it is only a matter of time until my version of the Andre 3000 flute album emerges.

Patrick also bequeathed to us a treasure trove of creative constraints that we can apply whenever we need to rejigger our brains. One such category of techniques comes from the OuLiPo movement of the 60s, in which French writers and mathematicians would introduce tight constraints to force unique modes of writing. This week’s prompt features one example but it’s worth a deeper dive.

Experiment away,
Jamie

📝 This week’s writing prompt

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Last week’s submissions: Hopes as a writer

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✨ Writing inspo of the week

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