Hi friends. Well, that was a week. Brief news: Next week, I’ll share some spring events for our community, including upcoming salons with
and . For now, a call for help from someone in our community affected by the LA wildfires. If you’re looking for more ways to help, you can also start here and here.As a little treat for every paid subscriber who makes this community possible, I share prompts most Fridays for anyone struggling to write— these have been paused the last few weeks, but we’re back. If you’ve taken a class with me before, you know the drill: take what feels generative for you, toss out the rest. These prompts are just to get you going, whether you feel stuck on a current project, want to explore writing in new directions, or just want to write something this weekend for yourself but don’t know how to begin. There is no right or wrong way to do this.
Feel free to post a line or paragraph from what you write and/or just share a bit about what comes up for you in response to the prompt below. And if you want access to this and other prompts, plus those upcoming salons, join us!
Please keep these prompts within our community. They have been acquired over many years of teaching, and I use them in my classes. I offer them as a thank you to paid subscribers for the ongoing support.
On story
In a memoir class I’m teaching right now, we have been talking about finding patterns of meaning in the odd memories we can’t shake, those that create the narratives of our lives, for better or for worse, and usually, mysteriously. We are discussing how finding those patterns can be transformative, not only for the self, but for the writing. Too often, when writing memoir, we feel our job is simply to recount all the events that have transpired in our lives, in order (hammering out what Vivian Gornick calls the “situation” rather than stopping to consider whether there is any “story” there).
But how do we find these patterns and how do we transform the writers keep asking. Some of this, I think, requires patient introspection, a type of work that is separate from the sitting down to write. But there are more practical strategies: find the question you’ve always been asking about yourself about what you do remember from a certain time, or find a subject you can’t give up, and begin there, rather than beginning with the what happened.
It can also be useful to be begin a book or essay with a story that you have long lived by that is failing, and that now, you that you must revise.