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…
Author: Mom Egg Review
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…
Tara Laskowski WRITING PROMPT Visit the Merriam-Webster Time Traveler site [link: https://www.merriam-webster.com/time-traveler] and choose the year you were born to see a list of words that were first introduced that year. Choose three of them and write a three-paragraph story with one of the words appearing in each paragraph. Tara Laskowski’s debut suspense novel One Night Gone won the Agatha Award, Macavity Award, and the Anthony Award. Her second novel, The Mother Next Door, was published in October 2021. She also wrote two short story collections, Modern Manners for Your Inner Demons and Bystanders. She has won the…
Samantha Steiner WRITING TIP: WRITING AND REST For a time, I was bothered by the question: what do I do on the days when I don’t feel like writing? I tried forcing myself to write every day. Sometimes I got into a groove, but sometimes I felt resentful. Sometimes the resentment lingered and I went weeks without writing. I tried taking the day off. Sometimes I felt newly inspired, but sometimes I felt frustrated that I wasn’t getting pen to paper. I tried taking the attitude, maybe I’ll write today and maybe I won’t. This felt like procrastination.…
Melissa Joplin Higley PURPOSEFUL PUNCTUATION Punctuation tells the reader how to read a passage or poem: how fast or slowly to proceed, where to pause or stop, where to reflect or rush ahead, what information to consider together or separately, and where to breathe or not breathe. Take a passage or poem you’ve already composed and see how changing punctuation and spacing affects the reader’s emotional state (relaxed, anxious, detached, comfortable). Where do you want the reader to slow down, go faster, pause for breath, run on breathlessly? No pauses (no punctuation): fast pace / breathless / flowing…
Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello THE EPISTOLARY EXERCISE Write a story entirely in the form of a letter to an individual addressing a specific conflict between you both. The addressee can be your imagined reader, a character, creature, object, place, or abstraction personified. Example: “To the rabbit who ate my late mother’s last collard greens…” What resolution or challenge might conclude your letter? Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello is the author of Hour of the Ox and co-translator of The World’s Lightest Motorcycle by Yi Won. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Kundiman, the Knight Foundation, and…
Mary McLaughlin Slechta WRITING PROMPT I have a small wooden drawer long detached from its bureau. It’s a great catch all for things I’ve kept past their usefulness and others discovered on walks around the neighborhood, especially in a park built over a former dump. Call it controlled hoarding, haute hoarding, and create one for yourself or use the one you already have in your kitchen. When unable to satisfy an itch to write, try sifting through these strange, orphaned objects. A two-inch plastic gas pump sat in my drawer until it told me something universal about a child’s…
David Hollander THE UNDELIVERED MESSAGE: A WRITING PROMPT Many of the prompts that I’ve had the most success with involve the institution of formal rules or limitations, which have the odd effect of liberating writers from having to “be themselves” on the page. To that same end, I often use a published piece as a structural model. In this case, that published piece is Kafka’s very short story, “The Imperial Message,” which I recommend reading and which can be found here: https://www.kafka-online.info/an-imperial-message.html The resulting writing prompt often helps generate a patterned story, mitigating what I think of as…