🆆 Micro Monday: Learning to Sail
#180 on storms, sudden changes, and empty houses
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, check out this post here.
I. This Week’s Practice
Quote #180
I am not afraid of storms, for I am learning how to sail my ship.
Louisa May Alcott
Prompt #180
Write about a time something changed in an instant.
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.
Departing by Charis Morgan
At the end of forty years of marriage, the house is nearly empty. Its face will fall last, like the final page of a book. The pipes leak hours by the minute, and the back door opens onto an unlit highway. The pine beams vault over red clay. The walls thicken, closing over doorways. Both the bare steps and children’s thumpings are absent. The house would have folded sooner, but its clocks lost their hands. The house squats on Spring Hill’s bald head, its face bricked up and six eyes rolled inward. Bedrooms hinge into a broom closet. The house refuses to call itself haunted or cursed. It covers a crypt, holding the dead who pretend otherwise. None of the rooms know their places or names. Like a child, the house has wet itself under the floorboards. Its eyes have filmed over, and red ladies tear from invisible cracks. The house hollows itself, losing flesh and memories. Unframed doors moan. Its dead are expelled, one by one.
167 words. This piece originally appeared in The Cincinnati Review. Charis Morgan, a 2026 graduate of the MFA program at the University of Alabama, has work in the Florida Review, Grain, and is currently living in Birmingham, Alabama.
III. This Week on Writer-ish and D3
Rest. Revive. Revel. We did it.
June 10, 2026 Weds 1:00 pm PT: 10-Minute Live Writing Sessions (LWS): if you miss a week, you can access past sessions in the library.
Coming up! On June 17, 2026 Weds 3:00 pm PT: 3 Things Short Prose Conversation with Rick Barot, Guggenheim and NEA Fellow and Director of the Rainier Writing Workshop MFA on the prose poem, emotional truth, and how writing micro breaks open memory, feeling, and meaning. This talk is on Zoom with more opportunity for engagement; free, registration required.
IV. ICYMI
V. From My Desk
Look at these beautiful faces! These are the 14 featured readers who shared their work at yesterday's Month of Micro Wrap-Up Party and Submit-a-palooza. From family histories and friendships to migration, illness, grief, resilience, and wonder, these stories grew from our daily prompts and 10 minutes of writing a day. Watch the reading and celebrate these writers and their wonderful words.
Month of Micro might be officially over, but we’re just getting started here at Writer-ish. As a paid subscriber, you have access to all the Month of Micro prompts and binder downloads, as well as past writing workshops and 3 Things Short Prose Conversations on Substack. You have until June 13 to catch up on any missed prompts and request your Month of Micro certificate.
Upgrade to a paid membership or join the premium tier, Micro Mastermind, which includes a one-hour consult with me to look at your micro and talk about your writing and creative path. If you’re already a paid member, upgrading will extend your membership.
During our monthly Paid Subscriber Co-Writing session this past Friday, I live edited a micro from our community and explored the idea of a piece’s “center of gravity,” the emotional thread carrying the most weight. When a draft feels stuck, asking who the piece is really about can often reveal what needs to be amplified, trimmed, or rearranged. Watch me live edit a micro along with highlights from the session and tips on organizing your micro binder.
Thank you for being here. I’m grateful for the kindness, curiosity, and creativity you bring to our community.
warmly,
Darien
P.S. To see what’s happening on Writer-ish this month including all upcoming Substack Lives, here’s the full calendar.
Lesson 240 words
Years ago, a small southern US town, July 4th in late afternoon, I ran away. I found a fair on the other side of the Norfolk Southern railway tracks. A hotdog. Choking, stuck, heat. Sweating fingers probing my chest. A hug, I thought it was love, then fresh air. I turned to look, but the man was gone. I remember the texture of clapping feet, a sound my memory tried to soften. I didn’t realize at the time that the Heimlich maneuver could look like a black man’s assault on a white girl. And while I didn’t have words for segregation or race, or the wrong side of the tracks, in that moment I understood explicitly that I was white and he was black. That it mattered deeply. Suddenly I perceived skin as meaning. And what I’d felt in his fingers was fear.
I also learned that I could die. While startling, it wasn’t as important.
In my 30s I went back to that town looking for lost pieces of myself. Someone who’d known me from foster care days told me this:
They called him Jersey. It wasn’t his name. He changed it when he got out of prison. Well liked. He farmed vegetables, only had one hand, the other lost to a farm machine. His real name was Ewo (pronounced ē – woah), Creole for Hero. He left town soon after. No one saw him there again.