I’m writing this a week ago, the day before Thanksgiving. There’s a fire in the fireplace. A movie on the television. My family of three in a row on the couch, two in shorts and one with a blanket. (Me. I’m the blanket, it’s me.) A lazy day together. Tomorrow we’ll cook (or more accurately, my son will cook, and I will be his sous chef). Watch World Cup games. Maybe play Scrabble. Watch more soccer on Friday before taking my son to the airport. This is how we do holidays —casual. Nothing fancy.
Why am I writing this today yet you’re not seeing it until a week later? Well, the magic of the scheduling button, of course, but mostly because I will be on a bucket list 60th birthday trip with my husband to a faraway place that is beautiful and warm, and I will be too busy snorkeling and enjoying ocean breezes to worry about the internet. I am not taking my computer. Although I do have books loaded up on my Kindle for the sake of space and weight, all writing will be in a journal. If I feel like writing at all. I don’t want to force anything. I want to enjoy the time, just the two of us in a place that’s far from day to day problems and concerns. Unplugging, if you will.
In that spirit, here are two prompts for you to do sans computer. And I’ll return to the computer and the real world later in December.
Without your phone or your computer, take a walk. A long one or a quick one around the block. Go slowly. Observe everything. As you observe, consider an image or word that repeats or stays with you. Observe everything through the lens of that one word. When you get home, get a pen and paper (still no screens), and write that one word in the center of the paper. Branch off from the word with every association you can think of. Use all of those diverse and disparate ways of looking at one word to draft a poem. (Adapted from an exercise by poet and lovely human Ciona Rouse.)
Get a pencil and any sort of paper — a sketchpad, the back of an envelope, a piece of printer paper, a journal. Choose a simple shape (circle, triangle, oval, etc.). Using only that shape, sketch or doodle an image. It could be representational or abstract. Whichever it is, try to evoke a feeling with your image. Once you are “finished,” without putting down the pencil, write about the image, the feeling it evokes, what objects you see in the shapes, what adjectives you would use to describe it. Use that list to draft an ekphrastic piece about your own sketch.