Writing Prompts

Happy Halloween from my
younger, sweeter self.


Photographs are my favorite prompts for writing students. Look closely, I always instruct. Consider not only the occasion for this photo, but the interaction of people, both the obvious subjects and those caught in the background. Look for those small details that hint at a time and a place. Speculate on their lives, their moods, their expectations.

When I came across two loose Halloween photos in a stack of old files the other day, I decided to practice what I preach. There I am as a witch, sitting with Paul and Michelle in their authentic garb from India. Paul wears a turban and Michelle looks impossibly young. The other photo is of Ray and Sondra, dressed in silk kimonos and playing one of my guessing games – also involving photos. Ray holds a lit cigarette in one hand and a lit candle in the other. Sondra holds pen and paper. Both of them smile for the camera.

This Halloween Party is at the Roundhouse, our very first house, and the exposed brick wall behind Ray and Sondra is the result of long, hard, hours of Tom’s labor. The Irish travel booklet in my lap has to be from 1970, and the slogan on my chest (“I’m Hecate, Fly Me”) mocks an airline’s ad slogan of the time. My costume consists of black leotard and tights, a hat made of black construction paper, and crepe paper streamers for my witchy hair. I have a lipsticked heart on my cheek, and I, too, hold a burning candle.

I could be satisfied with what little I see here, but because I wonder where my children are, and because I am a librarian at heart, I search for the album that once held these photos. This is what I discover: the party, for teachers from Tom’s school, was in October 1974. Our daughter has yet to be born. Our son is sleeping in his nursery. And this is what I know: in less than two years, that little country school will be tied up in a long string of misery that includes illness, divorce, widowhood, and murder.

None of those are the stories I want to write, so here is what I will tell you about the folks in the two photos. We have lived reasonably happy lives. We have all stayed married and raised our children. Paul and Michelle are grandparents. Sondra is now blonde, and Ray quit smoking ages ago. We remain fast friends, and our times together are filled with laughter, not remorse. Despite all we have learned of life in the last thirty-five years, we live with the same hopeful yearning once so evident on our sweet, young faces. Our story continues, and that is a prompt in itself.

Working on a Dream

Late in my fifties, I have become a groupie. The past two Tuesdays, I went to see Springsteen at the Spectrum, a Philadelphia venue Bruce has played 51 times, each time to a sold out crowd. The arena will be demolished at the end of the month. As a farewell to the old place, Springsteen and the E Street Band performed in their entirety three of his earliest albums on four different concert nights. Though Springsteen was the cover boy of AARP Magazine, having turned 60 this past September, his fans span generations. The twenty-somethings in front of us,far younger than the album, Born to Run, knew every word of every song. Philadelphia, the city of Rocky and cheese steaks only a cast iron stomach could digest, the city whose sports teams, until last year, were perennial also rans,loves Springsteen. We love the way he comes on stage energetic and doesn't stop moving or engaging us for close to four hours. No curtain warmers. No intermissions. A working man. You take your seat and he takes the stage. In a few minutes you and everyone else is out of your seat. Whatever sorrow you brought into the Spectrum, is ushered out the door. Even when he's singing what the critics the next morning will dub his "downer" songs, you are feeling whole and lifted.

The first Tuesday was planned months ago by my friend, Jeanne, the Springsteen addict who turned me on to his concerts, and included our husbands. As we walked out of the arena, singing and giggling in the colder than usual night, Jeanne told me she had heard there were still a few seats left for the last of the four concerts, a week away. "Want to try to get a couple?" She had a rough weekend of family crisis coming up; I've been in a blue funk. "It would be totally crazy," I answered. We decided "totally crazy" was just what we needed.

Jeanne's crisis weekend was harder than she anticipated. Mine was more blah. The seats we assumed would be terrible ("behind the stage" we were told, but really they were to the side, right where you could see every sweat bead and smile and crease mark in Bruce's jeans) were great. The audience bonded even before the band took the stage that second Tuesday. The night before, our Phillies (World Champions the year before but still the Rodney Dangerfield of sports teams, assumed to be a fluke winner) had hung in and come from behind to win a pennant-run up game against the Dodgers with 2 outs in the bottom of the ninth inning. If you made that game up for a poem or story, you would be told it needed to be made more subtle to be believable. We were in the Spectrum, everyone talking Phillies, when a security detail was spotted accompanying a VIP to his seat near us: Joe Torre, manager of our rival Dodgers. Instantly the crowd began to chant "Beat L.A." Torre was good natured about it all, understood that when fans are passionate, sports teams and performers are lucky, because passion is communicable. Torre waved and signed autographs on Phillies ticket stubs and then Bruce and the band came out and kept us all moving ("Born in the USA" that night)and for four hours we were all one. The next night our Phillies won another game, clinched their division title and secured a return trip to the World Series this year. Last year, their win came after a dry spell of nearly three decades. I thought fans would be blase this year, having come to see ourselves finally as winners, but we in Philadelphia are again delirious. Phillies red is on everyone. Total strangers chat in store lines about the moves of each player.

But this isn't a story about sports. This could be about writing. After decades of success, Springsteen's entitled the album and concert tour of his sixtieth year, "Working on a Dream." He's still working, though he can't need the money and would pack audiences into his concerts if he gave them half as much. He's still dreaming. For nearly four hours last Tuesday, he had thousands of people dreaming with him. Thousands of fists in the air, thousands of voices belting "tramps like us, baby we were born to run." I thought about the Phillies and those come from behind two runs. I thought about the friend beside me who had traveled and worked to help family members navigate the shoals of crisis though she wanted to hide from the pain. I thought about the story I've been stalled on for weeks and how I had been avoiding writing and feeling miserable, and I resolved to start back to it the next morning. It felt good to get back to work. Baby, we were born with passion; we were born to hang in.

Those Other Girls

In the past week, I reunited with two old and dear friends. One was a friend from high school, the other a roommate from college; one I hadn’t seen for over 30 years, the other for almost 40.

We all grew up in safe suburban neighborhoods and modest but lovely homes. Our parents drove us to music and art and dance lessons. We did not color our hair, except for an occasional lemon juice rinse, nor did we wear excessive makeup. We were raised to be “nice girls,” which meant the opposite of trampy. You know, those girls with ratted hair and raccoon eyeliner and skirts up to there. The girls who smoked in the school bathroom, snapped chewing gum, and went with boys who drove vans and station wagons that had curtains around the back windows.

Decades ago, I was jealous of one of these dear friends I recently met with because she had huge green eyes and attended every Beatles concert held at the Hollywood Bowl, and of the other because she was lithe and had a cute little candy apple red Fiat.

We went out into the world expecting it to treat us with the deference and care that our parents, in all good faith, led us to believe was our lot. We opened ourselves to love like corsage flowers.

Decades later, there are six divorces between us. We held on in our marriages until we saw we would die, either literally or metaphorically, if we stayed. We were lied to, bullied and betrayed in ways we could never have predicted back when we felt a young man breathing in our scent as though it were a blessing. Back when we believed it possible for him always to be charmed by the way we wobbled in high heels, or misplaced our keys, or smiled when we were actually upset.

There are daughters, sons, stepdaughters and stepsons, and we wish them well as they go out into the world. But we can’t protect them from the disappointments and cruelties of love any more than our parents could protect us, once we left their homes in search of our own.

I look at my friends in their fifties, and I want to weep because I still see the girls they were, the litheness heavier, the large eyes droopier. But beauty was never fully present till now—before it was merely freshness mistaken for beauty. We are beautiful today because we have been shattered, and we’ve repaired ourselves, like those other girls emerging from the curtained station wagons, smoothing their disheveled hair, opening their compacts to survey the damage.

As Time Goes By

Who knew there were varieties of azaleas that bloom twice each year? I grew up thinking of azaleas as a spring blossom, reliable sign of May in central New Jersey. Pink, white, salmon, purple: their hues varied but never their timing. The azaleas in my front yard, the shrubs dotting the university campus that was my personal park across the street, these flowered each year right around my early May birthday. They bloomed the same weeks as the magnolias--a whole grove of them a few blocks from home. I inherited boxes of photos snapped by my father each spring, my sisters and I dressed in party wear, faces forward, pink and white magnolia petals a curtain behind us. How many Mother's Day albums did these fill?

And here I sit: October in Philadelphia, white flowers feathering an azalea bush next to my bench. My daughter was a Philadelphia October baby, born into a season of gold maple leaves and red apples, crimson asters and bold orange mums. Last Sunday she turned thirty and I spiraled into a wash of memory; I have been pondering the texture of time. Some months and even years of her life have been viscous, slow moving, even gloppy or sticky at times. Now it seems whole decades have flowed rapidly around bends I never saw from the banks on which I stood as a new mother.

Thirty years ago minus a week or two, my mother wheeled her first grandchild, me walking beside the two women I'd become sandwiched between. We strolled around my block in sharp fall light, through crunching oak leaf piles, each of us lost in reverie. Suddenly, she looked at me, confused, startled. "I was just trying to figure out who you are," she said. "I just realized I've been thinking the baby is you." She giggled sheepishly when she added, "I just realized I'm not thirty years old any more." I retorted with something sarcastic, something that indicated that I thought maybe she should look in the mirror once in a while, as if her dislocation had anything to do with her salt and pepper hair and a few deeply etched laugh lines around her mouth. Someone once said we are all, always, every age we've ever been. I wish I could remember who said it.

My mother has been gone almost 12 years now. When she died, my baby sister planted a magnolia tree in her own yard up in Massachusetts. Each year, for a decade, my sister called or wrote saying "Mom's magnolia blossomed for her birthday again!" We decided the flowers, appearing on a spring bloomer in mid-September in New England, had to be some sort of benevolent sign. My mother's grandchildren ranged in age from eight to eighteen the year their grandmother died. This year the youngest is almost twenty. From Massachusetts, my sister writes me that a horticulturist friend has clued her in: it seems there is a species of magnolia that blooms twice a year. Who knew? I need to tell her about my azaleas. We will laugh at our naivete. We will laugh sheepishly, and then secretly long for our former ignorance. We will long for a time when the off-season appearance of a few fragrant petals could feel like a miracle.

The National Book Festival

So there I was, standing with my friend Barbara amidst the crush of people on the National Mall. All of us straining to squeeze out of the rain and into the tents so we could hear authors speak of their craft, read from their work, and inspire with their words. Despite the rain, a light, straight-down kind of rain, and the long lines for food, toilets, and book sales, the National Book Festival of 2009 was a grand event.

The authors, too many to possibly see, represented every genre. We overheard snippets from Judy Blume, Lois Lowry, Walter Mosley, and Nicholas Sparks as we wove among the book-reading masses. We were charmed by Jeannette Walls’ claim that she wrote her book imagining how a rich kid would someday read it and understand her life. We were inspired by Julia Alvarez’s fight to keep a Virginia school from banning her book and moved by Azar Nafisi's passion for becoming an American citizen. But being writers, and therefore observers of life, we were often distracted by the antics of those around us.

Having dodged elbows and umbrellas to make it to the first row of SRO at the John Irving presentation, we found ourselves directly behind two women breastfeeding their tiny infants. Given that Irving was discussing fatherhood, perhaps it was appropriate, but the people coughing down our necks only made me think of one thing: swine flu. Why would any mother bring a new baby into such a crowd? She was desperate to hear good writing? Or she was desperate to get out of the house?

We found seats before Marilynne Robinson began to read, but it was hard to concentrate when the couple in front of us was entwined into a single, two headed creature. His head nestled against her neck, her mouth scoured his face, and they whispered incessantly. By the time Tim O’Brien began to read, I figured they would slink away. But no, suddenly they raised their heads, rapt, as O’Brien read his essay. The girl wept at every word, and the boyfriend offered comfort by kissing her shoulder.

I wondered about that weeping girl then, and I wonder about her now. Was she the child of an aging father, which was the subject of the essay? Had her father died? I guess I’ll never know. But I do know what I witnessed. The absolute power of writers to sweep us worshipful readers away. And I say Amen.

Having a Hallmark Moment

I'm a sucker for Hallmark Cards and Kodak moments. It's not a great trait in a woman who teaches courses entitled "Strategies for Subverting Sentimentality When Writing Poetry of Everyday Life." I tear up when I read the human interest stories in the "B" section of my paper. Maybe it's autumn, the beginning of the end of another year. Maybe it's the upcoming Jewish holy days, the beginning of a brand new year in the Jewish calendar. It is a time set aside to reflect back, recognize and acknowledge what went awry, a time to munch apples with honey in hopes for a sweet new year. I think, though, that this jag I've been on started with Ted Kennedy.


"He was the man who read with me. I didn't know he was famous." That was some child in Washington, D.C. I was on Cape Cod the week Ted Kennedy died, was glued to every bit of the coverage. The Cape Cod Times was filled with stories of Kennedy's life in Hyannis. "He waited for his turn in line." The man at the bakery. "He helped us when we were at risk of losing our house to the bank." A couple nearing retirement. "He remembered to call my family every September 11, ever since my boy died in the towers." A Massachusetts constituent. "He was father to 11 extra kids after our father and Uncle John died." One of the late Robert Kennedy's sons.


I was glued to the news coverage of Kennedy's funeral-- newspapers, television, radio. A child of the Sixties, I bathed in nostalgia. Outside, Hurricane Danny whipped the National Seashore lands the Kennedy family had fought to preserve. Two days before the senator was eulogized and buried, the sun had shone on Cape Cod, and people-- natives, wash ashores and first time visitors-- had lined the roadways, stood on the bridge to the mainland with placards. They waited for hours to see the entourage carrying his casket, his family, for a few seconds. They stood in the sun with children on their shoulders, with elderly and disabled relatives in wheelchairs, thousands of "regular people" wanting to bid a last farewell to a man from a family that the press dubbed "American royalty." At night, the senator laid in-state in the Kennedy Library in Boston, I followed his journey off Cape to pick my husband, Steve, up at the airport. Along all roads, construction signs were lit and read "From the People of Massachusetts: Thanks, Ted."

I arrived at the airport red-eyed and full of Kennedy stories to share, but when my husband jumped in the car, the first thing he told me was that he'd started the morning comforting our neighbor, Sue. Sue was pretty distraught, had to put her beloved cat, Sammy, down the night before. When Steve got to work, he stopped in the coffee shop next door to his office for his morning coffee, and saw his usual waitress weeping over the dog she'd lost the day before. "It was a day for comforting people, I guess," he said.

"He accomplished so much in his lifetime," my husband says as he reads the litany of legislation for which Ted Kennedy is given credit. "I'll never do what he did in his lifetime." I thought about all those kids who will remember the old guy who came to their school and read with them when no press corps was taking notes, the Ted Kennedy I've been mourning. I thought of those bereaved pet owners comforted by my busy lawyer husband who has always meant to change the world. "Sure you will," I say.

Feel Young Again

I did something good for myself the other day. I stood up for a cause. I am not going to extol the firmness of my belief in the cause. This is not a political forum.

But I almost didn’t go through with it. I saw the opposition, gathered with their signs and sneers, on the corner opposite the one I was headed for. I saw police. A woman of the opposition goaded me. “Are you honestly going to hold that sign up in public?” I told her I was. And then she told me she remembered the days when… You can flesh out the ellipsis. She held a sign that had a plastic bunch of bananas attached to it and said something disparaging about our President.

I heard someone yell, “Who bussed you people in? There can’t be that many of you.” But there were that many of us. We outnumbered our opponents 3 to 1. I marched on and took my place with the other members of the rally. I stayed out in the hot sun for two hours embracing my right to gather peaceably with likeminded countrywomen and men.

I recommend that you go out and rally for what you believe in. It could be in support of a candidate or of a traffic light at a problematic intersection. It could be in protest of a proposition or a news channel. It could be anything at all you feel must be brought to light and set right.

I felt like I was twenty again. You will, too.