Each week when we gather to write together, I offer the members of my Writers’ Knot community three prompts.
The prompts are sourced from everywhere. A recent conversation in the group’s online forum. The astrology of the moment. Something my kid just said. An oracle card that leapt from the deck.
This week, it was the song I’ve had stuck in my head all week.
My fourteen year-old and I went to see the brilliant Irish singer-songwriter Hozier this past weekend. I shared the sacred experience that was singing his songs and cheering for permanent and immediate ceasefire with 25,000 people in upstate New York.
And so, this prompt is a little more personal and detailed than usual, but since we writers know it’s the specific that allows us to access the universal, it felt like the right creative risk to take.
Writing Prompt: Dream, Wake, Rise
In dreams begin responsibility - William Butler Yeats
It’s not the waking, it’s the rising - HozierHozier’s song “Nina Cried Power” hit me in an entirely new way. It’s an anthem that celebrates the greatest voices in 20th century music. It’s a holy, bluesy litany that honors the recent ancestors.
The first line has lingered with me, and it feels like a sacred puzzle to me. I offer a line written by another Irishman 100 years earlier because there seems to be something powerful - and potentially playful - in the progression.
Dreaming, waking, rising, and whatever “responsibility” might mean for you. Be with these ideas and the relationship between them.
If you need a more concrete place to begin, you might want to write a list of creative ancestors and offer them your praise.
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Can I tell you about what came through for me with this prompt?
In the paid subscribers’ podcast, Liminal Spaces, I share a very personal story about how these ideas are alive for me in this moment.
If you’re up for a story of mothering and menarche, gender identity and poetry, I hope you’ll listen.
