My debut fiction, fewer than 200 words, is up in the Winter issue of Shantih Journal. It’s a beautiful production and I’m super excited.
In the past I was often looking up writing prompts and finding them all unhelpful. This changed when I tried putting two different writing prompts together, which I’d now recommend for anyone. The trick is pick one that assigns a form and then one that focuses on the content.
In this case, one said to tell a story about the layout of your childhood home and all the people who inhabited that space with you, except to directly invert their characteristics. The other was something called a Fibonacci sonnet, that is, the word count of each sentence follows the Fibonacci numbers, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, etc., up to your desired F-number then back down to 1. I kept things simple with an F9 degree “sonnet” plus a coda.
I don’t trust the idea of “prose poetry” for the most part, mainly because I don’t trust my own judgment about such things. But the word count constraint had me focusing on prosody and sound patterns and music in a way I’ve never had before, even while trying to do legit verse. I insist this is a prose microfiction, but I’ve never felt more like poet.
Second Slope 