I’m three weeks in to the ten weeks of the Prompt workshop and enjoying the challenge. And it has been a challenge. Nothing about what we do in the workshop is like my usual process, not to mention the practice of reading my work aloud (to strangers, no less!).
Sharing these quickly written pieces with other people has been interesting. Encouraging, even. I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me before, but I had the idea this week that I ought to share at least one of my pieces each week here, as well. So I’m going to try to post at least one piece each week from that week’s workshop.
In each session, we do three sets of prompts, each set followed by reading our piece aloud and receiving feedback. We can opt not to read if we wish. The rounds are timed — sometimes only a couple of minutes, sometimes eight or ten, once as long as fifteen minutes. Each round, we’re given two prompts that we can pick from, or choose something else entirely if we’re inspired by something else. For each piece I post here, I’ll explain what that particular exercise round involved and mark the prompt I picked in bold, followed by the piece itself. To catch up, I’ve picked out a few from the previous workshops to share, but to keep the posts manageable, I’ll separate each week into its own post.
Prompt Workshop, Week 1
This was our first set of prompts. The first part of the session was spent in a written “conversation with the person to our left”, in which we couldn’t ask yes/no questions. We then read them aloud as a dialogue. After that, we took a time coming up with our group rules, such as “We will assume the writing is fiction” and “We won’t worry about spelling” and “We will silence our cell phones”.
We didn’t do any kind of round-the-table introduction, so this one served as our intro to each other, through our writing. I think we had six minutes for this round.
Prompts: My name I come from
My name is one of my favorite things about me. Mainly because I got to choose it, and that always gives me a good (and kind of crazy) story to tell. It also used to be very unique, and even though when I was in school, the fad of personalized everything meant there were no pencils with my name to be found on the racks, nor personalized unicorn stickers, I always felt this was an endorsement of my very own unique me-ness.
I’m proud of my name, every letter of it, and i’m proud of my identity, of where I come from. Which is odd, really, since I knew from the time I was very small that I did not want to stay there. The wild, sort-of-but-not-really rugged wilds of Wyoming, so sparsely paopulated and seemingly exotic to everyone who doesn’t live there. It is also something that is innately part of my unique me-ness, a place I’m proud to be from, and love very much in a special secret way that I can only tell in pictures and stories and memories.
I did not belong there — Wyoming does not fit me and I do not fit Wyoming — but I’m better for it, and I’m glad that it loomed so large in my growing-up life. So few can claim to be from Wyoming, and (used to be) so few can claim to have my name…they’ve become my own Venn diagram of identity.