Writing Prompts: STORYTELLER #1

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First Mentor Poem

What Gets Us Out of Bed in the Morning
RHONDA GANZ

I met a man Thursday whose brain once kept moving at high speed after his skull had come to an abrupt stop. When we met, he was pushing a shopping cart with empty soda cans and wine bottles, which he figured would get him six bucks at the depot. Seventy years old, he’d slipped on the ice three times already that morning because people on his route hadn’t cleared their sidewalks. He couldn’t decide between blueberry or cherry danish at Sally Café so I bought both, and we stepped into rare winter sunshine as he told the story of how he’d come to be where he was. When he got to the part about being in a coma for six weeks in Atlanta, a Southern drawl introduced itself. After the coma, he spent another 540 days in hospital. They were using him for drug experiments by then, wanted to dissect him for research. His sister, a lawyer in the fancy part of town, finally got him out of there and sued the state of Georgia for 5.6 million dollars. A cheque will be ready in February he said, signed by Obama before he leaves office; a cheque the new guy can’t take away from me. That’s great I said, February’s not very far away. Just around the corner, he said back. It’s just around the corner.

                         salt water aquarium 
                         jellyfish 
                         press against the glass
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--from Rattle #56, Summer 2017
Tribute to Poets with Mental Illness

Writing Prompts #1

• ​Write a poem about what gets you out of bed in the morning.
• Tell me about a mental illness.
• Write a poem in a perfect square across the page.

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Second Mentor Poem

A Story
SARAH PEMBERTON STRONG
 
On the street of my childhood
a boy kept a pet boa constrictor.
 
The boa ate live mice, one per month.
The boy left home and left his mother
 
in charge of the feedings.
The mother, unaware
 
the boa had just eaten, dropped a second mouse
into the glass terrarium.
 
The boa was already full and not interested.
The mouse huddled in a corner, terrified.
 
After several days the mouse began to starve:
no mouse food in the terrarium.
 
The mother, unhappy in her role
as procurer for a snake,
 
kept as far away from the terrarium as possible
and did not notice
 
anything. Eventually
hunger grew stronger than terror
 
and the mouse
took a bite of the boa constrictor.
 
I won’t prolong this.
The bite became infected and the boa died.
 
Eventually the mother noticed.
When the son came back
 
he found the palatial glass cage
inhabited by a single mouse.
 
When I think about this story now,
I think most often of all the life I’ve spent
 
being the huddled mouse,
in such danger, I felt,
 
but not.
It is harder to see that I have also been the snake.
 
 
And the mother. Too many times
the mother.
 
But today when I thought of it,
I was the boy,
 
staring in amazement at a life
I would not have thought possible
 
had I not been there to witness,
firsthand, the blindness of the body
 
and the persistence of the body
and the circumstances
 
of the body among others,
the body that needs and needs
 
and forgets absolutely nothing.

--from Rattle #46, Winter 2014
Rattle Poetry Prize Finalist
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Writing Prompt #2

Consider a story you’ve told over and over (or heard someone else tell) – So what is it about that particular story? What compels you to keep revisiting it? As you investigate it, let the poem appear.  Write for 10 min.  Ready? Go!
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Poem for Discussion

The Story, Part of It                       
 MARGE SAISER   ​

 The story, part of it, is that
the tractor was parked, running,
at the top of the hill, and that
my sister Jennie, ten years old, climbed
up and took a seat at the wheel. The story,
 
part of it, is that my father worked on something
attached behind the tractor, the boom of the digger
or the chain, perhaps; the story does not tell all. It tells
what he said to Jennie, his instruction; it tells
what he said into the fierce wind blowing that day,
the roar of the wind and the roar of the tractor.
 
He said, “Whatever you do, don’t step on the clutch.”
The wind took his words, flipped and turned them,
gusted them even as it gusted everything it could,
even as it tossed the ends of the red scarf Jennie wore,
flapping it out and back, out and back. Jennie
heard him say “Step on the clutch” and she did.
The tractor lurched down the hill like an animal
 
freed. The story, part of it, tells how the tractor
rolled, gaining, how Jennie stood steadfast
on the clutch, hanging onto the wheel, her hair
and her red scarf flying with the speed of it, how
the tractor roared down the slope until it
hit the barbed wire fence at the bottom,
broke through and rolled over,
how she flew off, and the clutch engaged and
killed the engine. Everything was at that second
silent from the roaring, and Jennie was
face-down on the grass, alive, but he, my father,
thought she was dead.
 
And years later when my father was dying, I called
Jennie. You’d better come, I said. She arrived
at the hospital and I met her at the main door
to show her through the maze, the halls,
to my father’s last room. We turned the turn
and could see him ahead. No longer
a man at work. Or rather a man doing
the new work of dying. He sat in the bed, tubes
into the skin of the backs of his hands.
He looked up and caught
sight of her, of us, and then he did what
Jennie cannot explain, get over, understand,
make sense of: he put his hand over his eyes;
he looked down at the floor while we came to him.
The story, part of it, is that Jennie cannot let go of this.
She told me: It’s what he’s always done--
he did not want to see me, to look at me.
No, I told her. No, it was to keep from crying.

--from Rattle #40, Summer 2013

Bonus Writing Prompt

• Tell me the story about something that got lost in the wind.
• About a misunderstanding.  
• About the story . . . or at least part of it. 
• Tell me about what someone cannot explain, get over, understand, make sense of, let go of

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