🆆 Micro Monday: Be Fearless
#183 on strength, storms, and memorizing poems
This is Writer-ish with Darien Gee, where I help you write your most powerful stories in 300 words or less. If you’re new to micro prose and writing with me, start here:
I. This Week’s Practice
Quote #183
Be strong, be fearless, be beautiful. And believe that anything is possible when you have the right people there to support you.
Misty Copeland
Prompt #183
Write about a storm.
Set the timer for 10 minutes and start writing. When the timer goes off, give the piece a title, count up the words, add it to your TOC, and share it the comments below.
II. This Week’s Micro Prose
This section features micro prose (300 words or less) by me and other writers, including members of our community. Submit your work for consideration here.
from During the Pandemic by Rick Barot
30.
During the pandemic, I had days when I felt I was by myself on a shore drained of the tide, dragging a stick across miles of wet sand. There were also days when I was a boy again, sliding down a snowy hill on a flattened cardboard box. And there were days when I remembered the teacher who made us memorize a poem each week, and when we asked why, she said we might one day find ourselves in a wreck at the side of the road and we would recite these poems to stay alive.
96 words. Rick Barot’s work has appeared in numerous publications, including Poetry, The New Republic, and The New Yorker. His next collection of poems, Shadow Machine, will be available in fall 2028 by Milkweed Editions. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Stanford University. Rick lives in Tacoma, Washington and directs The Rainier Writing Workshop.
Watch the replay of my conversation with Rick (and hear him read this piece and several others):
III. This Week on Writer-ish and D3
10-Minute Live Writing Sessions (LWS): There’s no live writing session this week, but you can access past sessions in the library.
IV. Where to Submit This Week
Each week I’ll be sharing a couple of places for you to submit your micro. Paid subscribers can follow these suggestions for revising their micro or preparing their work for submission.
Mouthful of Salt is open to micro and flash submissions under 2,500 words:
Molecule is open to creative non-fiction that is 50 words or less:
V. ICYMI
VI. Reads of the Week
VII. From My Desk
It’s almost time for another 2- or 3- week micro prose writing workshop at Writer-ish on Substack! Please cast your vote for what we’ll be focusing on next. Expect to see them all in our library over the next few months, but I’d love to know which one you want to try first.
I’m in the final month of my manuscript draft (take two) for my Bloomsbury Object Lessons book on the fortune cookie. I’m writing about this over at Drafts, Deals & Detours, where I’ll also be launching the Sandbox in August, a monthly Zoom for your writing-life decisions, publishing problems, and platform puzzles (think office hours, writing/career coach, brainstorming, mastermind group). I’ve also started a new novel and manage a couple new paragraphs a day, which is fine for now.
My husband was let go from a job he loved a few days ago, and we’ve been reeling. Like most critical life changes, when it happens, it happens fast. Terms that were used in the paperwork: termination, severed, impacted, eliminated, older workers, release of claims, binding agreement, remainder of page left blank intentionally, we’re here for you. I’m going to write a bunch of prose poems, turn them into a chapbook, then send it to HR. Kidding! (cough, cough) My husband and I have been through this before, the big pivots and moments where you have to dig deep, decide who you are and what comes next. It still sucks. That being said, we are trusting this moment, no longer panicking, and accepting it as an invitation for something new. The kids have been great. We carry on.
Thank you for being here and for the kindness, curiosity, and creativity you bring to our community. I’m grateful to have connected with you in our little corner of Substack, and I look forward to more.
warmly,
Darien
P.S. To see what’s happening on Writer-ish this month, including all upcoming Substack Lives, here’s the full calendar.
Oh, so sorry to hear. Given the number of federal jobs in my area of MD, I hear this every day now. Be well.
Here's mine. No idea where it came from, but after I saw the prompt I read the rest of your post and this was what happened.
268 words
Sometimes words are hard, so twig spends the night
A long storm - fierce with pride in all its rhymes and brittle lights - blows out the night. Witches’ wind and big branches break in my bedroom window, put a twig on my pillow. Wet, cold, briny. Twig asks if it can spend the night. I smell its bark and say of course, not sure at all that I’m awake or what I have agreed to. I’m living in liminal. Convex thoughts, the world’s a mess, unfindable words, but I’m curious. So I ask twig, do you miss your tree, now that you’re blown off? Does it worry you that all tree’s roots reside below and forever? – for me, that would mean a kind of death – and tree’s branches, all the twigs, do they love the roots, have they even met? Do they kiss, can they talk? Does the trunk hold your heart?
There’s no response to any of this but the wind picks up so I go on. Twig, I want to know, is this really me who is here? do “I” exist? By that I mean is this voice mine, can I make beauty with my words, or am I just a borrower of verbs?
Twig seems to understand we will not kiss tonight. But the wind calms and twig speaks kindly: take your heart out, put it here. I will scrape it raw with all the frozen wreckage of yourself and you must watch. But then, the sun. We’ll place your heart in the middle of the poem. Write from there.
Sorry to hear about your husband's job loss. That really sucks. Hope something good comes from it. 💓