Diamond in the Basalt

I wanted to share with you all my secret fantasy. I was thinking about where I work (Community-Minded Enterprises), the Shrinking Violets, and my grad school program (at EWU), and how my life is compartmentalized with some overlaps. CME is working on Sustainable September, a month of events moving our community closer to sustainable living and working. Grad students love public readings. Then everything meshed together for a minute, and I had this idea—why not have a public reading in September that will showcase creative writing done by community members, sharing thoughts about sustainability!

I discussed the idea with the writers who showed up to the workshop last week, and they thought it was a great idea. So I’m trying to put it all together now. I would like to share with you the poem and the essay we discussed in the last meeting and the prompts that we used, in case any Violets couldn’t make it to workshop, wanted to write, and would like to work on something that I could help revise at a future meeting. Then maybe I could encourage you to read it out loud to your friends, because I know that

1. the piece will be awesome, and
2. everyone will be supportive

Fleshing Out Abstractions

Poetry/Fiction Prompt:
Based on T.R. Hummer’s “Apocatastasis Foretold in the Shape of a Canvas of Smoke” (This is an embedded book, so I recommend typing “Apocatastasis” in the search pages function.)

Take an abstract noun and work on concrete, sensory images that help to define it. For all of the prompts, I recommended nouns such as sustainability, community, and green.

Take a complex, rich (in meanings) abstract noun and couple it to a closely observed narrative so that the meaning of the abstract noun is revealed or illustrated or suggested by the details of the narrative.

Nonfiction Prompt:

Here is a link to Michael Pollan’s “Why Mow? The Case Against Lawns”

You are probably an expert on something that everyone else thinks that they know. You know something more about the topic, though. Write a redefinition essay that will explain

1. the general understanding of the thing, and
2. what you think it is really all about.

Happy writing!