Greetings, writers—
I just found out that Duran Duran played at the Moda Center last night. I’m not ashamed only marginally embarrassed to admit that I loved Duran Duran as a kid (slightly bloated Simon was my favorite, even though I could see that John was foxier and Nick had more flair). The reason I loved them? They were my babysitter’s favorite band, and my babysitter was magic.
Her name was Ming, she was a senior in high school, and she was the most fun person I’d ever met in my whole life. Although, thanks to her influence, I made a variety of questionable choices—perming and feathering my hair so it would look like hers, memorizing the lyrics to every Duran Duran song in existence, and acquiring teddy bear hamsters just like the ones she kept—who among us, alive in the 80s, can look back and go, “Yeah, I totally got that decade right”?
It’s actually the hamsters I was thinking about the other day, not Duran Duran (I didn’t know they were still around, let alone going on tour), because I came across a Sharon Olds poem that reminded me of Ernestine, Jellybean, Pepper, Ivory, Garth, and all their furry kin whose names are lost to the mists of time.
(But hamsters, Duran Duran, perms, softball, touch football, varsity jackets, and calligraphy all make me think of Ming.)
What struck me about this Olds poem was the way it takes a small moment (and a familiar one to me; a hamster doesn’t even live as long as your average gerbil) and transforms it, as the narrator’s discovery of a humble carcass leads to a subtle meditation on motherhood and caretaking, and an expression of profound longing.
Two prompts for today:
Begin a scene (or a poem, or a freewrite, or whatever) with something small and concrete and missing. Then expand outward. Go big, go abstract, go nuts.
Take the structure of the poem’s title and shift it—new age, new adjective, new something-you-suddenly-don’t-have. Then use it as the title of a poem or a piece of flash fiction.
And if you want to read an essay that also starts small and domestic but ends with a knife to the emotional guts, there’s “Winter in the Abruzzi,” by the brilliant Natalia Ginzburg.
Btw, paid subscribers got a Wednesday post about writing in “the gush, the throb, the flood, of the moment” (that’s Walt Whitman, not yours truly) and a video I found that’ll make you want to buy Palamino Blackwings and take typing lessons.
Happy writing!
Emily