Hello, hello from icy Brooklyn!
Once again, it feels like it’s been way too long and time is flying. I hope you’re all as well as can be given the general state of the world (world war, pandemic, you know.)
In a spare moment the other day, I managed to read my friend Chris’s lovely letter on teaching and finding beauty and meaning in the natural world, and I realized how deeply I miss this space and community. I want endless time to connect to all of it, which is such a non-problem—literally, I have simply been feeling overwhelmed with all the people and things and practices I love and miss and want to keep up with.
But good problem or not, it does feel impossible to keep up with all of it, and that often includes writing to you in this space. The other day I wrote a 4,000-word missive on writing and trauma and ADHD and almost posted it here only to realize it was likely incomprehensible (was there a throughline or was it just my tired brain letting off steam? we’ll never know). I held off on sending it because it didn’t feel polished or complete and I only want to share things that feel special and lovely to read.
And yet—one of the many things I love about my MFA program is how well it encourages us to share things even in those early, intimate stages of creation, to be generous and open in how we open our work to others and in how we receive others’ work.
So in that spirit, I thought I’d share one of the short stories I wrote in response to my weekly workshop prompt the other day. We’re assigned these prompts in both my workshop and craft classes and when you couple finishing each of these with our responses to readings, feedback for our classmates’ stories, and the two ~25-page stories we submit to be workshopped each semester, you can see why even weeks of writing for nearly 8 hours a day every day don’t guarantee I’ll finish my assignments, let alone any personal writing I intend to do.
But the prompts are fantastic, and for anyone who enjoys writing and wants to have a go at it, I’m including the one that inspired this story.
I’m currently taking two fiction classes, and this particular prompt was tied to a Carmen Maria Machado story I’ve always loved, Inventory.
The prompt: Write a story organized as a list or an inventory—people I’ve kissed, jobs I’ve had, etc. Use this list to slowly reveal something behind it… the reason for the story structure.
And here’s what I wrote and read aloud (remember these are intentionally quick and unpolished, these prompts are more about learning skills and writing with constraints than they are about producing something beautiful):