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The poetry night at the old train depot that surprised me
Last Tuesday I stopped by the Reading Room in Portland for their open mic, mostly because I heard they serve free coffee after 8. The place used to be a freight office, and they kept the old ticket window as the stage backdrop. What got me was how the prompt table had little slips with single words on them, things like "rust" or "delay," and everyone pulled one to write from. I grabbed "crosstie" and wrote a piece about walkways in ten minutes, and it felt easier than staring at a blank page at home. Has anyone else tried using a random object or place detail as a starter, or do you all stick with full prompts?
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the_felix10d ago
and honestly that crosstie prompt sounds way better than what I usually do, which is stare at my notes app for an hour until my coffee goes cold. I did something similar last month at a pop up in a laundromat, they gave us dryer lint and a receipt from a random street as our starting points. I wrote this weird thing about a love letter found in a coat pocket and it just flowed out, no forcing it. The trick is that having one dumb specific detail takes all the pressure off making something profound, you can just play with it. I tried doing the same thing at home with a random word from the dictionary and it was not the same, something about the physical object or place makes your brain work different. Full prompts always feel like homework to me, but those little one word slips are like a cheat code for your imagination.
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