Suzanne Roberts is the author of Animal Bodies: On Death, Desire, and Other Difficulties (Nebraska, 2022), longlisted for the 2023 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award; Bad Tourist: Misadventures in Love and Travel (Nebraska, 2020); and Almost Somewhere: Twenty-Eight Days on the John Muir Trail (Bison Books, 2012), winner of the 2012 National Outdoor Book Award; as well as four collections of poetry. Visit her website at www.suzanneroberts.net.
Drawing from more than thirty years of creative writing teaching experience, Suzanne Roberts offers down-to-earth, witty, and wise straight talk about writing and the writing life, accessible craft discussions, and thought-provoking twenty-minute genre-crossing writing prompts. This multi-genre approach is arranged by theme, including memory, family and friends, writing the body, love and lust, death and grief, nature and the environment, stories of shame, and magic and myth, along with discussions of revision and editing, building writing community, and publishing. The chapters offer a short discussion of each theme, friendly pep talks, accessible craft tips, a selection of thirty-five poems, stories, and essays from a diverse array of contemporary writers, and, of course, the writing prompts.
Featured authors include Camille T. Dungy, Carolyn Forché, Gina Frangello, Linda LeGarde Grover, Lisa Lee Herrick, Major Jackson, Rebecca Makkai, Eva Saulitis, Patricia Smith, Stacey Waite, Lidia Yuknavitch, among many others, with writing advice of their own. 52 Writing Prompts will encourage and motivate both aspiring and established writers.
52 Writing Prompts is now avialable. Below is an excerpt.
Writing Prompt #1: Getting Unstuck
The novelist Ellen Glasgow says, “The only difference between a rut and a grave are the dimensions.” Think of the times in your life when you felt stuck in a rut. Maybe you were stuck in a job, a town, a marriage, or a role you no longer wanted. If you’re working in fiction, think about the ways your characters are stuck. Set your timer for five minutes and make a list of all the ways you (or your character) felt stuck. Doing this exercise for the main characters of my novel- in- progress helped me figure out important plot points.
When your timer goes off, have a look at your list. Which situation was the most difficult to get out of? What did becoming unstuck require? Who did it benefit if you (or your character) stayed stuck? Who helped you (or your character) get unstuck? Choose one of these situations and set your timer for another fifteen minutes. Write about how it felt to be stuck. Or maybe you (or your character) didn’t notice it at the time. Mine this theme of being stuck/getting unstuck in poetry, memoir, or fiction. Write lines or sentences, exploring.
When you’re out of time, have a look at what you’ve written. Is it the seed for a poem, essay, story, or something longer? How can thinking about the ways we’re stuck free us in our creative lives? Can you use the same techniques you employed to get unstuck in other areas of your life?
Readings
ESSAY
THE LOVERS
Brian Turner
It’s sort of a meditative process of looking through this microforest of follicles and hairs and looking for just the right potential movement or shape. — Dr. Michelle Trautwein
It’s near midnight on a Friday and a mosquito banks in a wide orbit around me. Such quiet determination. Such patience. It’s not unlike the patience exhibited by the microscopic world as it waits each day for us to sink into the pillows and wander into the hours of dream.
If we could look closely enough at our own skin, and if we magnified that landscape so that the fine downy hairs of the body, known as vellus hair, might rise into view like the trunks of saplings, and if we were to walk in that strange grove of leafless trees and then peer down into the pores which hold each knotted root as it forms below, where the well of the follicle is coated in oil secreted by a sebaceous gland— we’d discover the home of Demodex folliculorum and Demodex brevis. Mites. These are microscopic animals, whole communities of them, and they have dwelled in human skin likely since our earliest ancestors looked up in wonder at the stars. With claw- tipped legs and fusiform bodies, they are arachnids, cousin to the spider, and their lives span the duration of about two weeks. Some estimates suggest we harbor hundreds of thousands of these animals within the largest organ of our bodies— our skin. Think: eyelashes, the tiny follicles and pores within the forehead, nose, cheeks.
By day, they clamp onto the hair follicle and it’s thought they feed from the oils there. It’s possible they might also feed on the ragged waste of dead skin cells. Some suggest that they insert a retractable needle from their mouth organ and then nourish themselves by draining the fluids from within dead cells. They face downward as they feed, as if staring into the burrow they live in, while others work their way into the deepest structures of the pore, except when laying their eggs just outside of the burrow.
As we speak, our diaphragms compress in order to funnel air out of the lungs and through the tracheal tube so that it might be modulated within the larynx. The things we say to one another and to ourselves resonate through the bones of our skulls. Soundwaves travel throughout our bodies, and that language also travels through the fluid cellular structures of our skin in a muted version of the original. Where the mites live. There in the cross- hatched shadows where strands of hair curl over in a gentle matting of keratin and oil.
By night, the Demodex mites living in our faces emerge from their dens in search of others to mate with. They travel at about sixteen millimeters per hour, or a little over half an inch. And I wonder if they recognize something in the rise and fall of their terrain as I whisper to you in the dark, or when we made love in the hours before dawn. I imagine them pausing in their own lovemaking then, or as they traveled from one burrow to another. Under a canopy of fine, tangling hair, they tilt their heads back to take in the darkness, which is sweet and washed in pheromones, to consider how strange the world is, how mysterious, how fortunate they are to live in this forest of lovers, where the voices of the gods sometimes call out across the sky, and the thunder of it rolls through the living flesh of the world they know as their one and only home.
Writing Advice from Brian Turner
Live. Fall in love. Get your heart broken. Find ways to heal and fall in love with the world. Use art as a meditative practice, as a doorway into the unknown. If you find tears in it, coupled with wonder, then share it with another. Maybe it will help to ease suffering in this life. Maybe it will help others to find their own way forward.
