Aging

Crows feet run from my eyes like rivulets down dusty hills. Gray strands of hair shoot across my head like lightning in a night sky. I’m aging. And I’ve accepted the way aging looks on me. Acceptance is a powerful thing. I could stand before a Nordstrom mirror and…

A ten-word prompt poem — She startles most nights with an amber urgency. Bottled-up desperation, her dank terrors testify. Creamsicle sunshine nudges her eyelash curtains back. A daily performance of okayness masks her quietude. Life’s ambiguities and concerns whirl and rotate through her anxious mind. Responding with deep breaths of reckoning relieves the surface pressure.

Major Societal Changes Over Our Lifetimes — Do you want to write but have no idea where to start? Check out this new writing prompt to help unleash some ideas! Use the topic as a subject for your next piece or simply answer one or more of the questions posed. If you’d like to become a writer…

I stole the first book I ever loved — I stole the first book I loved, a history book of the Old West, pictures of Indians and cowboys, the first trains and buffalo. I was in first grade, the teachers knew it was me, but I think they were happy a poor kid learned to love reading. No one…

I want to be safe again, hiding away under my little desk — Twelve years old, the shrieking klaxon rattling the wall, our class scuttling under wooden desks, heads between our knees…. the perfect position to die when the Soviets drop a nuke on our little farm town. I wish I still had that desk. I watch news and my wife finds me under…

I grew up in the ’50s and ’60s and thought every family was normal except for mine. Television showed us what was normal, right? “Father Knows Best” Jim Anderson would come home from work, flop into his easy chair with the newspaper, and enjoy interacting with his family: wife Margaret, and kiddos Bud…

Form provides feeling — The smooth shapely maple blocks with which to build, the sense of which never afterward leaves the fingers: so form became feeling.” Frank Lloyd Wright, autobiography Tactile learning is one way of learning. Babies feel and touch and put everything in their mouths. Frank Lloyd Wright described his childhood playing…