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I have a very clear memory of a moment from an undergrad poetry workshop with Jan Beatty that may have never happened. The workshop was in one of the nondescript first-floor classrooms in the Cathedral of Learning at Pitt, with stone floor and standard-issue cramped desks, rooms that either froze or blazed in the winter because the heat for the entire building seemed to have only a setting for on or off.
In my memory, Jan flipped off the lights, played a song that sounded like roaring, then commanded us to write. She may have even said, “write the thing that scares you.” I don’t remember the name of the song or anyone else who was sitting in that room. I don’t remember what I wrote. What I remember is how it felt: like a deep and urgent thing was rising up out of me. This stpry may sound hokey but there was something magic about sitting in that ordinary room and being told that the dark thing deep inside me mattered.
This prompt draws from that memory of Jan’s workshop and borrows some of its framing from a prompt that my colleague and friend Cynthia Arrieu-King uses with her students. Here’s Cindy’s language:
Okay, it’s tough, and I’m not comfortable telling you that you must do anything on any day anyway. But maybe there’s something you’ve been afraid to write about. Write about it. In a class of homeless kids once a student wrote a poem, then crumpled it up and wrote something else — it might even have been a copy of the first poem. And one of his classmates pointed at the crumpled up poem and said, “That’s what I want to hear. That’s the Real Poem.”
Let’s write a Real Poem.
Prompt #27: what you've been avoiding
Take a look at everything you’ve written this month, and perhaps your older drafts as well. What have you been avoiding? What have you left out? This might be something deep and dark that’s felt to hard to touch - but it might be something that’s felt scary or hard to access for another reason. When I was nearing the end of my second book, I read through all the poems with this question in mind and realized that in a book that’s largely about early motherhood, including birth and breastfeeding and postpartum anxiety, I had somehow managed to not use the word vagina once, so I gave myself that assignment. (I actually wrote two vagina poems; here’s one.) But also, I realized the book needed more joy, so I wrote into that, too. Make yourself a list of what you’ve left out.
Now: write the poem.
If it feels hard to get started, consider changing your medium of composition. If you normally draft in a notebook, try index cards or post its. You could tape big sheets of paper to the wall (or tape a bunch of printer paper together) and write on that. Or you could take yourself for a walk or drive and use a voice recorder on your phone to capture the poem. Sometimes changing the medium can shake new things loose.
Sharing your work helps sustain momentum. I’ll leave the comments open, so you can share a poem title, a snippet of a line, or something else about your writing life. I’m also on twitter (@nancy_reddy) and instagram (@nancy.o.reddy), if you want to check in there.
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why writing is hard & how to do it anyway