#bee walsh

[rpdsociety]

Writing Prompts

The writing prompts in our newsletter are some of our most-loved content. We wanted to show you that we don't just write the prompts - we also utilize them in our own works. Below, all of our staffers have tackled a different writing prompt featured in one of our newsletters. We hope you enjoy our future prompts and use them to help inspire work you'll submit to RPD in the future!

Jen: Write about the person you think you would be if you had made a different choice at a critical juncture in your life.

Who would you be if you'd said no? Who would you be if you'd stayed where you are, if you continued down one path? Would you still be wondering what-if? Would you be a hero? Where would you call home? At 28 years old, I am going back to a time when I was much younger and trying to make up for lost time. If I hadn't missed out on my mid-twenties, if I hadn't gone home to take care of my mother, I don't know who I would be. My character would be a more exaggerated version of who I was four years ago, and I'm not sure if I would want to be that person. I walked the path that I did. I made the choices I had to make. I can't go back and undo my mother's illness or my parents dependence on me. But I can start over now. I can be young a little while longer. I can say that I don't know who I am yet - but I'm working on it.

- Jordan Rizzieri, Editor-in-Chief

~ * ~

Bee: The Irish and the Portuguese have a shared cultural identity around the concept of SAUDADE, an untranslatable word that refers to a deep emotional state of nostalgic or profound melancholic longing for an absent something or someone that one loves. Write free prose for a minute about something you know you'll never get back whether it be a time or a place or an idea.

When I was in college, all my friends lived together in the dorms, and later in on-campus apartment buildings that were clustered together, the farthest one no more than a minute from door to door. Seeing a friend was as easy as walking down the hall and could be done at almost any time of the day or night. People would drop in, drop out, stop by on their way from or to somewhere else, parties would swell and shrink and swell again as people came and went. One of my friends used to talk about buying a big house after college where we could all live together, but with our own rooms. Five years out of college, it's obvious that's never going to happen. I don't even want it to anymore. My relationships with most of them have changed, some in subtle ways, others glaringly obvious. Still, sometimes I wish I could go back to the time before those cracks formed; to living so close together that we were connected not just by friendship but by hallways and doors; when we were close in more ways than one; when the hardest part of visiting them was braving the Buffalo cold for 30 seconds, whereas now the hardest thing is deciding which friend I can visit this year because I only have enough money for one plane ticket.

- Jen Lombardo, Non-Fiction Editor

~ * ~

Jordan: Take a moment to recall how many years removed from your high school graduation you are. Imagine a reunion was being held soon and that you (and all of your classmates) were forced to bring your 17- or 18-year_old self to the event as your date. What would you talk about? What events over the course of the life you've lived since you were them would you  warn your younger self about? What would you keep from them? Write the scene, with dialogue, as a script. Adam: (Literature) Write a letter to a novel protagonist who has meant a great deal to you. Talk to them casually as if you've been friends for a while, because, in a way, you probably have. Don't postmark, don't send. Don't wait for a response.

I am taking my sixteen year old self

as my date to our ten-year high school reunion.

I am on my way to pick her up.

She didn't recognize me

when I asked her out.

I wanted to tell her

that she needed to stop agreeing to go out

with people so much older than her.

I wanted to tell her to make friends her own age.

Instead, I told her I'd pick her up at 7:00 pm.

I'm having a bad influence on myself,

but I need her to hear me.

I brought her a copy of Tom Robbin's

Still Life with Woodpecker,

because she shouldn't have to wait

five more years to learn about

blood and the moon.

I need her to know about 2011.

I need her to hear about our mother.

The reunion is in the same ballroom

where our prom was, balanced on the edge

of the sea. Ten years ago, I wrote a spell

on a napkin for a tidal wave, an act of

god, or something to come up from

the depths of the ocean to kill us all.

Instead, my date danced with everyone

but me and here I am now

with myself, introducing her to

people who dont rememebr

either of us.

"What shall we do, all of us?  Us

passionate girls who fear

crushing the boys we love

with our mouths like caverns

of teeth, our mushrooming brains,

our watermelon hearts?"

She passed me a napkin

with a spell to turn us into

glitter and blow us out the window.

We both thought it would work.

We took each other out the back door.

She ran into the ocean

arms out like the Virgin Mary

of Reckless Abandonment.

- Bee Walsh, Poetry Editor

~ * ~

Adam: Write a letter to a novel protagonist who has meant a great deal to you. Talk to them casually as if you've been friends for a while, because, in a way, you probably have. Don't postmark, don't send. Don't wait for a response.

Dear Fyodor,

It's been some time since I've written you. It's been some time since I've thought much on you or your words, despite the fact that I have the hopeful ones imprinted on my forearm. Admittedly, I sometimes forget they are there. I sometimes forget quite a bit, and then I remember before losing it again. I think that's a blessing, and I think it is one I have given myself.

The days are different now. They are busy and complacent. There are minor pangs of it still, twinges, that surface only when time goes too long unoccupied. And unoccupied time is less the case now than in years prior when I wrote to you more frequently.

So for all intents and purposes, I am mostly content.

Yours in the silence we've shared,

Adam Robinson, Fiction Editor

~ * ~

Bee: I've been trading emails with poet Jeremy Radin the past few weeks, all loosely centered around the theme of our Ideal Winter. Write a letter, long or short, to anyone (or no one) about your Ideal Winter.

Sis -

I wonder sometimes if my vision of winter - the winter in my daydreams - is the result of being left out. You and Mom and Dad have all experienced Proper Winters; I'm the only one among us who's never lived in Alaska. Those things that are heritage for our family are only footnotes for me.

I have never seen the Northern Lights. I have never seen starlight at noon.

My ideal winter is dark. Stars, streetlights, and sparkling snow - have you ever been awake at 4 a.m.? I'm sure you have; you work too hard to escape it. There's an isolation at that pre-dawn hour, a stubborn quiet that assures us that we are the only ones awake. The unbroken quiet - the promise of both solitude and possibility - that's what I think of when I close my eyes and think of the cold.

I never thought that cold and loneliness - lifelessness and lightlessness - would ever feel so much like belonging.

- Wilson Josephson, Assistant Poetry Editor

~ * ~

Jordan: Keep track of all the Facebook statuses, Tumblr posts and Tweets you don't send or end up deleting. Splice them together into a poem.

this city is full of ghosts

i saw him again

it was / it wasn't

it is / it couldn't be

another deep breath for the lone road

my fingers aren't long enough to reach you

just long enough to draw thin lines

in all the places i shouldn't

another deep breath for the long road

my arms are wrapped around myself

just long enough to offer a bit of seclusion

in all the places i shouldn't

"thinking of you, but not often"

thinking of you, but too often

there's a whole story we could have written

several months skewed,

several counties through

what's the cost for a line in another song?

channeling a simple

(simple?)

(simple)

thought

into as many formats as we can

an escalation / too taut again / a longing / too fraught within / a conversation / too in the dark to break light

this could have been something, something, something

in any other city, scene, time

see you on the other side.

- Kaity Davie, Social Media Manager

[vaginazine-blog]

What I meant when I said I meant it

Because I’ve had two fingers pressed into the soft spot at the base of my neck between my collar bones for twenty minutes. Because I’m worried that my arrhythmia is really in my head. Because as soon as I remove my hand from my chest, my heart skips forward and doubles back. Because maybe it’s just trying to remind me that I don’t have a heart, I am heart.    Because when my heart pauses, it makes me swallow, hard, like my body thinks that’s how I breathe, by swallowing in my stomach and not in my lungs. This is what I mean when I say it’s hard to find the air. I’ve been putting it in the wrong place all these years.    Because something about using how I threw up after the first time I listened to Pianos Become The Teeth’s “The Lack Long After” as a metaphor against making new friends.    Because we have all entered rooms and wept.

Because I’m translating things from English to English. Because I only see half of what I’m writing. Because I call people until they answer and that says more than anything I could.    Because it’s as if I purposefully put myself out there in all the wrong ways in hopes people will be reproachable in their dealings with me. Because on a scale of not getting it to getting it, you get it. Because you read me like book, a reluctant book, a book with a slow beginning.    Because what would I do without you.  Because something about putting my two fingers pressed up into the soft triangle at the base of my neck, where my collar bones constantly miss one another, for what seemed like but was certainly not the better part of a year. Because there’s certainly no way that I created something in my head that I felt in my chest. Because maybe I just described the last ten years of my life.  Because in translating this from English to English and back again, something is going to get lost. Because sometimes the curtains only look blue to the author when you or you or I or you would call them Pacific, which is exactly what standing on the shore with the water on the wrong side is like.  Because I have this idea that if I put the air where it goes and stop vomiting in public private places, I’ll be less attuned to how much my building shakes on a daily basis. Because, well, what if it’s not the building.  What then.

-- By Bee Walsh

[vaginazine-blog]

Hastily Written Subway Poetry, pt. 3

Let’s talk more about the choices we make

for the better

and less about nights

being sat

slunk over coffee mugs

apologising to friends,

for sorrow.

 Instead, let’s make fruit juice.

Put bright colors in tall glasses

and look into each other’s eyes.

 Let’s travel in pockets;

always reach out,

and up,

and past limits.

Let’s learn “limitless”

inside and out.

 From now on,

let’s be akin to

sun-drenched yellow kitchens

and good hair days.

 Let’s make each other feel good

and look good

and be good.

-- By Bee Walsh

[rpdsociety]

Dear Endings,

Dear J -- On Tuesdays and Thursdays, I spend an hour and half in a room heated to 104° surrounded by others in various stages of being in their bodies. We practice Bikram Hatha Yoga together, concentrating on what it means. Broken in half, "hatha" translates to "sun" (ha) and "moon" (tha); as a whole, it means "force" or "violence." Our teacher is six months pregnant, and seated on her mat, she uses her long arms to explain that we move to channel two such entities as the sun and the moon together, the energy it would take, the force. We struggle with our minds and with our bodies to find inside of ourselves the part that not even death can touch.  Laying in savasana after we are done, I focus on the low-light coming from the ceiling, and if I believe there is a part of me safe from endings, and how I would even begin to know it if there was. I make a list of all the things in my life that have ever ended and what they took from me, and I know in this moment that while there have been endings, I have never been ended, that there is a difference between having something taken and letting it go. I close my eyes and pray for a feeling of immense fulfilment and mental clarity to wash over me in my discovery, but the waves do not come. I am laying on the floor, I am dripping with sweat, I am no different a being than when I walked in the room. It is the first day of the tenth month, and the old god is passing back into the underworld. The acorn squash in the market I stop in on my way home remind me that I should give thanks to him, and to the goddess in preparation for the winter months, but I am distracted by vegan ice cream, and don't remember until half-way down the block. I am most alive as the earth dies in late-Autumn, but even at my most, I am hardly anything at all. I am reminded of an article I read once titled "Existential Depression in Gifted Individuals" where the author asks: "If we must die, if we construct our own world, and if each of us is ultimately alone, then what meaning does life have?" I will continue to craft a narrative of myself until my mind fails me, or my body, or both. I will continue because I can't find the point of the alternative (though somedays, I do). I will twist in hot rooms and scoop out the contents of gourds and say nice things to others and bite the inside of my mouth as if any of it matters, because maybe it does, but just by being I am not ending and that's certainly enough for now.  -- B

[rpdsociety]

Artist Spotlight: Bee Walsh, Poetry Editor

[varsitycharity-blog]

HEY! I made this last night and it would mean a lot if you gave it a listen! Some of my friends are in the song too and they are fantastic people. Ok. Sorry. I hope you like it. 

[varsitycharity-blog]

AY. I made this today. It'd mean a lot if you gave it a listen! :)