Julia Strayer WRITING PROMPT I love writing to photos. They open new worlds and new possibilities. Google “Street Photography” and select the images tab. Choose the first photo that grabs your attention. Write the story. Don’t overthink; don’t think at all. Just write. Don’t read what you’re writing. Don’t revise or edit in any way. Just write and keep writing. If you’re stuck, you can answer questions: Who is the character in the photo—what makes them tick, where do they live, where did they come from, where are they going, what’s the most embarrassing thing that happened to them,…
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Ana C.H. Silva WRITING PROMPT What’s the first thing you remember eating as a child? Food name = Title Use as many of the 7 senses (sight, sound, smell, taste, touch, smell, thoughts, and emotions) as possible to describe that moment. Example: Spearmint The first thing is the unexpected taste. A city child, grown mostly indoors, that day I was alone outside, reaching for a green leaf sticking through our neighbor’s chicken wire fence. While on my stomach, I smelled the sweet bright scent – instinctively foraged it. Mashing the green flavor between my milk teeth, I remembered the leaves on the…
Joan Silber WRITING PROMPT Ask three different people what’s the most dramatic thing that’s ever happened to them. Pick one to use as the basis of a story. This gets us to think about what “drama” is. We often use the term to mean overdone emotion (at my goddaughter’s nursery school, they used to say, “Save your drama for your mama,” and even the four-year-olds knew what they meant). But writers who like subtlety (I’m one) can err on the side of being too undramatic, too flat. This exercise starts by letting human examples define the term by…
Nancy Stohlman WRITING TIP Bribing the Muse: On Your Mark, Get Set… Sometimes our stories fall flat, without that “pop” of tension. One great way to create urgency in a flash fiction story is by using another constraint: Time. For almost a decade now, all my college classes have begun with a 10-minute timed writing. Timed writing is nothing new. We know that it helps us transition us into the writing space, like stretching before a workout. We know that it forces us to stay present and dig deeper—writing past where we might have naturally given up. And we know that…
Dawn Raffel FLASH PROMPT Select an object in your home that has a personal history. It could be anything—a souvenir coffee mug, an old piece of furniture. Then use the object and the emotions it evokes to create a fiction—not the true story of the object, but something new. Dawn Raffel [Dawnraffel.com] is the author of five books, including The Strange Case of Dr. Couney and The Secret Life of Objects. Her work has been selected for Best Small Fictions three times, as well as Best Microfiction 2021, and the Norton anthology New Micro. Her next collection, much…
Mom Egg Review Book Review Guidelines Mom Egg Review publishes reviews of fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry books or chapbooks that are about motherhood or that focus on women’s lives or issues. Our primary interest is in books released within the current year. Book reviews are published on our website, http://merliterary.com Queries For Presses and Authors: If your book fits our focus and you would like us to consider it for review, please fill out our Book Review Request form, here: https://forms.gle/3rYDAxNz48SL7Tt89 You will be asked to include publication information, a PDF copy of the book, a .jpg file of…
Peg Alford Pursell WRITING PROMPT From Dear Silence by Victoria Chang “When unrelated aunties and uncles came over for dinner parties, I envied the laughing as they Reunite wine, ate steaming fish and tofu. When they left, they took all the words.” This passage reveals a complexity of emotions. The first sentence suggests the experience of the narrator being an outsider in her own home. Write a flash about a character who is an outsider in a familiar setting. Provide sensory details about the group the character isn’t part of and about their activity. If you wish to go…
Jennifer Martelli WRITING PROMPT Listen: someone is crying in the other room. Who is it? Why are they crying? Are these tears of joy? Grief? What are tears, anyway? Are they trying not to cry? Is there something that will make them stop crying? Jennifer Martelli is the author of The Queen of Queens (forthcoming, Bordighera Press) and My Tarantella (Bordighera Press), selected as a 2019 “Must Read” by the Massachusetts Center for the Book. She is also the author of the chapbooks In the Year of Ferraro and After Bird, winner of the Grey Book Press…
Sarah Herrington PROMPTS AND CRAFT TIP Craft Tip + Prompt: The Writer’s Altar “The artist seeks contact with his intuitive sense of the gods, but in order to create his work, he cannot stay in this seductive and incorporeal realm. He must return to the material world in order to do his work. It’s the artist’s responsibility to balance mystical communication and the labor of creation.” – Patti Smith, Just Kids Craft Tip: Writers work so often in the fields of imagination, memory, and the unseen (but felt!) realm of language, so it can be helpful to get grounded…
David Ryan EXERCISE: FLASH AND TORQUE This might work best with an idea you’ve already had in mind—some single, relatively simple idea that seems strange and interesting in some way. It might be something that happened to you or someone else, or a compelling anecdote someone told you. The exercise: Start to write this anecdote or idea as an active story, but instead of writing it out as it happened, take every third sentence you’re writing and flip where you were planning on going. In other words, using a kind of free association, surprise the story you thought…