Writing Prompts

1. Write about the home you've come from, the home you're building, and/or the home you will build, borrowing structure/ diction from any of the poems we've read.

   1. If you are looking for a place to start, pick a favorite moment from one of the poems we read & copy that line/sentence. Then, copy the grammar & syntax from that line, but replace the words with your own, writing towards home

2. Person in a Place (See "Miss You" and "Mother and Daughter…”)

Think of someone you associate with feclings of "home," though this person doesn't have to be a family member, you don't have to associate them with your literal "home" as in the place where you live with people who care for you.

1. Now think of a very specific place you associate with that person - a place that isn't your literal house or apartment, someplace more public. (Like the restaurant in "Miss You" or the mall in "Mother and Daughter at the Mesilla Valley Mall."

2. Here's the fork in the road:

   1. Either write a poem that directly addresses the person you're thinking of ("you'") and speaks to them as if you are already IN/AT or about to be in/ at the place you thought of for step two, and they're about to meet you there.

   2. OR

   3. Write a poem that distances you from a past version of yourself - put yourself in a third person pronoun, and write the poem as if there's a camera watching you at this place, interacting with this person. If you go this route, you're not allowed to dip too much into what's going on in the heads of the two characters in the poem.

3. For either option, start by writing down as many concrete details about the PLACE as you can come up with. Then start writing.

4. Golden Shovel- take a line (or stanza) from any of the poems we've read & start eacline of your poem with the words from that line, in the order they appear in the line.

5. Start a poem with a line/ end a poem with a line from one of the poems

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