Untether yourself and astonish yourself!
It hardly seems logical that a photograph of a strongman lifting a heavy weight, under a heavy sky, could lead to a poem about last love. Yet Genevia Hendry wrote this extraordinary piece the week our prompt was a photo of Juan “Juanito” Ballesteros, three-time strongman champion of Mexico and Latin America’s strongest man 2016. Her work is a brilliant demonstration of how with practice you can teach your rational mind to untether itself from what’s expected, and allow your imagination to take your writing somewhere entirely unexpected. When you surprise yourself in this way, freshness and energy pulse through the words.
“Faded Magnolia”
Fit to bust, making soft eyes at the sky, lifted, a single
dream, multiplied into nothing short of wonder.
Oh, my love, consecrate me now before the rot, before the
light fades, before forever comes - Forever beckons like the lost love it is:
Lovey-dovey sky kisses me back. Slain by pleasure I rest. Breaking
through the clouds with hammered fists, I punch the sky.
And it replies: With echoes upon echoes, ever echoing, memories
multiplying like maggots in the flesh of dreams, falling off the bones
of hope, eschewing any mercy and forgetting grace.
There is only this slanted dying light reflecting off a dish
on the dresser, wherein rests an eyelash, waxy cut nails reaching for heaven.
Click here to order 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, or buy it from your favorite online retailer. It’s also available on Kindle and all other e-book platforms.
In May 2023, our online video course “Write What You Don’t Know: Imaginative Storm Writer Training” will be available on Teachable. Join our mailing list now for updates and a 25% discount.
Follow @imaginativestorm on Instagram for a daily writing prompt, or download April’s list of prompts here. You might also like to explore the extensive archive of visual and audio writing prompts on our YouTube channel. Then, publish what you write on the Imaginative Storm Circle platform! We’d love to read it.