probable causes

Dear Photograph,

In 1981 I drove to New Smyma Beach, Florida to see the sunrise. Of course I was alone, I was always alone. Body issues, feeling self conscious and having such a hard time making friends always gave me plenty of time to day dream. That day was the point of inception for me as I wanted to see myself as the sun did when it rose. And so I brought a mirror so I could photograph myself. Thirty one years later this photo is proof that I was stronger than them all. Validated and accepted by the one friend who would always be there shining on me…the sun.

Tony

Find a photograph that has some meaning for you and write, not to the people in the image, but to the photograph itself. What relationship do you have with that photograph, or with the moment that photograph captures? For those of you who try to avoid writing about personal experiences, how can you engage with the photograph and with what the photograph represents without falling into sentimentality? Try as best as you can to work with a physical image, as opposed to something that only exists digitally.

Long time, no Probable Cause. Forgive me. Since the last challenge, much has happened, including tour of Japan, Singapore and a little bit of Malaysia. The time away was good (and that’s an understatement). And now, on with the prompts.

I have yet to settle into a routine, but for now I’m going to experiment with posting twice a week and see how we go from there.

I’ll also be looking out for responses to any of the challenges posted here to showcase as features. Feel free to submit poems, prose poems and flash fiction to probablecauses @ jsamlarose.com, including the date of the challenge your piece was written in response to.

Happy writing.

Moira Egan, Vespers (via grammatolatry)

What’s your relationship with age, or ageing? Do you have an elder relative in the family? Did you never know your grandparents? What space do they leave or fill? And in the other direction, are you an elder brother or sister, aunt or uncle? Parent? What understanding does the distance between you and any older or younger relative lead you to? What does that distance mean to you?

In your response, try to include three questions, or the same question three times (the repetition will provide a structure). Your question/questions won’t necessarily be answered in the piece, or, in the case of a repeated question, could even be answered in different ways each time.

poetrysince1912:

—Alan Feldman, Poetry, November 2001

On August 9, 1945, U.S. forces dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki, Japan. Hiroshima was hit three days earlier. Pulitzer prize-winning author Richard Rhodes discusses his book, The Making of the Atomic Bomb.

And you? What characterises the time of your birth— the year or era? What was the prevailing, dominant reality of the time? And what, if anything, did that mean to you and your life?

—Mark Doty.

Generate a portrait of a place. That can be a place you’re intimately familiar with, or a place that you’re visiting for the first time; either way, ideally, I’d like you to actually spend some time in that place. Consider it a field trip, and try to make it somewhere a little more adventurous than one of the rooms in the house! How can you capture this place in words? What must be written to present it on the page?

Of course, I’m not looking for a prose paragraph describing your chosen location. As BH Fairchild has said: “what poetry is engaged in, the kind of language it’s engaged in, is not the language of aboutness, it’s engaged in the language of isness. You’re not trying to point to something out there, and talk about it, you’re trying to actually put it right on the reader’s fingertips.”

(http://rattle.com/blog/2011/12/from-a-conversation-with-b-h-fairchild/)

“This seascape was taken while aboard a Dutch Beam trawler in the North Sea. I’ve logged years of my life at sea working or photographing aboard fishing vessels in Alaska and Europe and have probably shot many thousands of pictures of the ocean alone. Very few of these images make the cut to see the light of day. There was something particularly dark and calming about the light on this evening as a great storm was beginning to subside. We had been dragging for sole, flounder, and plaice for nearly six days with nothing in sight except the occasional gas rig, barge or sea bird.”

What do you see? And what does it mean to you? Are you moved to explore the physical qualities of the image, the way the surface of the ocean looks like raw flint? Or is there something this image might represent for you, some experience you can marry it up with? Your choice: a descriptive or representative piece using this image as a starting point.

Image and excerpted text: Corey Arnold via FlakPhoto.com

Write about a beginning. A moment when something began or happened for the first/last time. Do as best as you can to stretch beyond clichés— both in the moment you choose to write about, or the way you handle that moment in writing about it. This doesn’t have to be about something from your own personal experience— you could imagine yourself into someone else’s experience, or explore an important historical event. How does that moment end? What significance does that moment hold for you or for the wider world? And how do you communicate all of that as evocatively and efficiently as possible?

Welcome. You’re here because you want to write, and sometimes it’s nice to have someone (other than yourself) point you in the direction of what you should be writing about. Here, you’ll find starting points, stimulus, little bits of inspiration. Text, images, audio, video and sometimes combinations of the above. All’s fair in love, poetry and prose. What are you waiting for?

probable causes

Back to the grind…

let’s begin

readme.txt