Writing Prompts, Poem Beginnings

In seminary class on Monday night, we did a series of writing prompts to help us think about the final story we are going to write/tell.  We have been exploring "stories of power," the title of the course, stories like Frankenstein (Mary Shelley's 1818 novel, not all the other incarnations), Hesiod's Theogony, Hamilton (the Broadway musical), certain Bible passages, Encanto (the Disney movie), and certain secondary sources that analyze some of the primary sources.   We've looked at these stories as origin/founding stories, stories of belonging, stories that tell where we're going, and stories of authority.

For our final project/paper, we have to write or tell a story that's been powerful in our own lives--taking a story from our life to tell a story.  I immediately thought of many possibilities, but I've been doing this my whole life.  Most of my classmates have not, and some of them have been feeling stymied.

We spent the whole class Monday night doing some free writing, talking about what we wrote, and writing some more.  We wrote in three blocks of time, three prompts per block.  We divided into groups of 3 to discuss, and then we discussed in the whole class.  I found it a valuable exercise, so I thought I'd preserve the prompts here:

Writing Block 1  Founding Stories

-- Where do we come from?

--Here's what we overcame, to be who we are

-- A story about "us" I struggle with is . . .

Writing Block 2  Belonging

-- When Others Ask Me Who We are, I tell them . . .

--Here's what we don't do

--We have made it this far because . . .

Writing Block 3  Mission/Destiny

-- At our best, we would . . .

--The mission that binds us together is . . .

--To fulfill our destiny, the sacrifices that we have to make are . . .

I found the writing that I did for Block 2 to be most evocative--not so much for the final writing I'll do for this class, but in terms of making me feel like a poet again.  Here's what I wrote for the prompt of "When Others Ask Me Who We Are, I Tell Them":

We are a nation of quilters, of people who patch things together out of frayed scraps. We are a nation of people who can take junk parts and make a car or a computer. We are people who don't want to share our scraps or junk parts, even though they're not really worth very much. We are a nation of victory gardens and burning forests. We are a nation that's not smart enough to keep an eye to the east, from where the storms will come. We are full of pockets of people who stretched food by adding starchy bits, who took the parts that no one else wanted to cook and figured out how to make them feed the whole community. We are a nation that doesn't want to share our food, even though it's full of worms and weevils. We are people who have made a way out of no way, but can we keep doing that and make a way?