Listening to Amy Winehouse on a Wednesday

I find that the colder it gets, the more I have to say. It could also be that I have been away from my Mum for nearly a month now and she is the person with whom I have the longest and most involved conversations. Her absence and the restlessness of autumn made the third assignment easy for me to start. I like having a bit of direction when it comes to expression. I remember googling “writing prompts” with my friend Cara once in a hotel room on the way to visit her college because we both wanted to write but nothing was coming to us. That’s when I miss high school classes. My teachers always had funny little prompts ready for us to respond to. And in high school, I let myself deviate from the prompts if something better was coming but it didn’t quite fit the rules. Confidence helps disobedience and oftentimes disobedience is the key to good writing.

Anyhoo, I like this whole “workshopping” thing. It’s interesting to actually converse with poets rather than try and guess what they’re saying. Somehow I always manage to forget that poems are due on Tuesdays, though. And I write them with far too little time to spare, which doesn’t allow for much mental marination.