One of the most Human Writing Quotes I Have Read
and a poem...
I can’t help sharing Nathaniel Wittemore’s words today along with the author’s stunningly moving poem (which is also a story), Death and Tacos, in RATTLE along with a writing quote for the ages. I agree strongly with all of this, and love what the author says about resistance. The pieces I’ve resisted writing the most have turned into my best. This is just one more reason why A.I. writing is wrong. Any “tool” that supposedly eases our process—smooths things out—needs to be rejected by the real writer.
A writing prompt for today is hiding below the quote. :)
Nathaniel Whittemore: “This wrong world can either beat the poetry out of you or it can beat it out within you in long brawling measures of tough and fisted line. And timing and rhythm are well enough but not all. Pace your precious self for longevity or go all gloriously out in the first round, either way it beats, at you or in you, this wrong world. And it’s fine to try and make it right. But to make it write, even when it resists you, especially when it resists you, this is the only strategy it never seems to anticipate. This is the single blow that it cannot counter. So I write to rattle the strategy of life. I come out swinging and singing, hoping, in the end, to wear it down to nothing but sucker-punches and death; cheap-shots and a bell that never stops tolling in a roundless match. I make this wrong world write for me the only way I know how.”
Prompt: Write a story or poem about a character who talks to a child about something hard. Prompt words: oily, pink, worm, coffee, styrofoam, bird, trash. Comments section open for paid subscribers.
Torch Song
She lights the torch of the garden Lady Liberty as she has every night in the years since her mother ran away. She never understood why the mother had gone to the trouble of adopting her if she was just going to leave her alone in the house. It’s not as if the mother had ever been a wanderer: she lived in a house three houses away from the house she lived in while she was growing up. And now the daughter lives there. It’s the only house she’s ever lived in. In the red maple beside the garage, she watches a bird abandon her chicks mid-worm and hears her father’s voice saying some people are not cut out to be mothers. She blows out the match of the torch she has lit. The sculpture’s green has faded. It peels like sunburn and she steps deeper into the night. She blows out the torch and closes her eyes against the smoke.