Greetings, Writers!

What a week.

As we shared with some of you via email, Kristen and I will be posting weekly prompts on the blog for the foreseeable future, every Sunday night. We hope that somewhere in your week when you need or want a break from the news or from daily routines, you’ll set a timer for twenty minutes and take time to write.

So many people this week have been championing our doctors, nurses, CNAs, healthcare workers, EMTs, grocery store staff, and delivery folks. Not to mention our educators, who, according to Shonda Rhimes, should be paid a billion dollars a week, and the parents who have stepped in to help their kids learn at home while they themselves are trying to work. And rightly so! All work has value, and all work and workers should be valued.

But we also wanted to point out that in times of strife and conflict, so many of us reach to the arts for comfort: we binge watch tv, laugh or cry with a movie, scroll our media content creators, read books and poetry, take virtual tours of art galleries. Art is where we all go to escape, or feel at home, or to work through huge things like love and fear and despair and hope-things that might get lost in the echo chambers of text or social media (although memes are having a moment-and there are some pretty funny ones out there right now).

In the years that Kristen and I have been facilitating the group, what we know-and what we suspect you all know-is that there is deep value in writing and sharing experiences. We challenge you to keep up the good work.

So, with that said…

Set your timers for 20 minutes and give these prompts a try:

You could place all the world’s cities before me and I would know only this one…

Weeping under a blue-black sky is for suckers or maniacs…

Feel free to submit your responses in the comments section if you’re comfortable taking credit for your response.

Want to submit anonymously? 

Email your prompt response to: southcountywriters@gmail.com and we’ll post it under the southcountywriters name with no other identification.

Happy writing!