Trying something old

I began keeping prompts here when I was teaching writing weekly in the Intensive Outpatient Psych programs at Walter Reed and Ft Belvoir*. Each week I’d write a post with a poem I’d been thinking about, so that people who I’d met in those programs but had completed treatment and left the DC area could keep writing and stay connected. Since I stopped teaching in those programs about five years ago, I began teaching online, I began running CBAW, and this practice went to the sidelines.

I want to commit to getting back to this, but I’ve failed at that before. I’m afraid of creating another source of guilt for myself. But sometimes we have to. This practice was always so wonderful for me, a way to write directly to my community of fellow readers and writers, a way to connect the dots of what I’m thinking about. To write something messy and loose for some future version of myself to come back to.

Here’s what I’m envisioning as a structure:

About a year ago I started keeping brief notes of my Friday workshop prompts in my google calendar because a few times someone asked me about x prompt on y day and since I am no longer printing things out, I have no record. I’ll go back to the first one in my record and write to it. I’ll share that once a week on my substack (the form is embedded below, or you can go here). Then I’ll archive it and share the next one. If you want all of them, you can pay to subscribe and that would be great. If you want to just write on time with me for free, that is also great. If you want to share your poems or thoughts in comments, I will love that.

*before that it was the cutest little cooking blog I made to encourage my older son, then 8, to get into photography. He is 24 now and not into photography but he is into cooking.