Louis Faber: from 10-minute writing prompt to published writer
Do you want to be a published writer? There are many online journals in which you can publish your writing, but how do you make your submission stand out from the crowd and get published? The secret to arresting, original writing is to write what you don’t know. As Robert Frost said, “No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.”
Advance your goal of being a published writer by working with our writing prompts (over 100 on YouTube and a daily prompt on Instagram @imaginativestorm), and, as we do every Saturday in our Prompt of the Week gathering, set a timer for 10 minutes. Join us one Saturday! it’s free and the Zoom link is on our homepage: click here.
Liquid Imagination (issue 52, October 2022) just published this poem by Louis Faber, which was written in just 10 minutes in our Saturday Prompt of the Week gathering. The prompt was the image on the cover of this blog post; I call her Our Lady of Walmart, because that’s where she came from.
The only difference between the 10-minute first draft and the published version is the hyphen in “orange-orbed.” If you don’t believe me, visit the Imaginative Storm Circle and read the original post, written on October 30, 2021. This is the second time that Louis Faber has published a poem he wrote in an Imaginative Storm session in just 10 minutes. (The first is also on this blog, titled “Deep.”) Amazing!
The Saint of Uncounted Names
A desert again,
always a desert
and she the saint
of uncounted names,
her crying eases, no
smile appears for this
Madonna of the coyotes,
her orange-orbed eyes
shuttered against the
slowly retreating sun.
Once her tears watered
the desert sands, mixed
with the blood of a Christ
now long forgotten, trans-
substantiated into a spirit
we formed in our image,
no longer we in his.
The Blessed Mother
watches, holding hope,
holding space, holding
a serenity we cannot
fathom in our search
for divine justification.
She remembers, she mourns,
for what ought to be, and waits
for the windwalkers
to pull the blanket
of stars over her.
Coming in November 2022: Write What You Don’t Know: 10 Steps to Writing with Confidence, Energy, and Flow by Allegra Huston and James Navé, founders of the Imaginative Storm method. Click here to pre-order.
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