Prompt #5: Toes & Truth
Prompt #5: Toes & Truth
Writing with our bodies
Hi friends,
We loved all of your love poems! It was great to see how everyone addressed the prompt in their own way.
In response to last week’s prompt (“What the fire reveals”), Sean shared a piece that navigates the rhythms of relationship: “Keep the peace / She must / See the splinters / She does… You know the steps / You know the act / There is no fall where boulders don't rest,” writing about a deeply connected relationship without mentioning the word “love.”
Jo shared a piece that sings boldly and ironically, “I loved your silence...I loved your anger...I loved your insecurity...I loved your hesitance,” using love as an entry point to a range of emotions.
And Katie shared a piece that collects tender moments and brings them all back to oranges (check it out here and give her a substack follow!)
It’s been really fun for us to send out these prompts, and we love seeing your engagement with them. Now that it’s been a few weeks, are there certain things you’d like to see in future prompts? Particular topics, formats, or ways we could make the prompts better? Are bi-weekly Mondays working for you? Feel free to let us know in the comments, or respond to this email to message us directly!
You’re all inspiring, and we love reading your work.
Thanks,
This week I wanted to share a CAConrad prompt, which I got from a craft class on embodiment with Jess Arndt. We were discussing embodied writing, which was, on one hand, strange, because of course the act of writing is already embodied— it happens in the body: the hand moves, the shoulders shift, the muscles around the eyes engage or relax, the brain fires away. And yet, Jess says, when we specify embodied writing, we seem to be pointing out some difference. There’s a sense that writing can be more 3D than we typically consider it. That words have physical dimension, centers of gravity, weight. That our bodies can tell us truths more precisely than our minds can, in specific and surprising and sensory language.
This week’s prompt is about writing the truth of our bodies, aka, LET YOUR TOES KNOW THE TRUTH. Check out this CAConrad exercise and others like it here:
CAConrad’s (SOMA)TIC POETRY EXERCISES
LET YOUR TOES KNOW THE TRUTH:
Take account of how many times you're not saying or doing EXACTLY what you want to say or do in a day. How many times do you use a tone in your voice which is not honest? How many times are you polite when you want TO SCREAM? How much compromise does your day comprise? Take CLOSE account of this. DON'T LIE ABOUT IT EITHER! This is for you, no one else will know SO BE TOTALLY HONEST! What is your body like when you're not being who you are? How does it feel? Are your hands doing something in particular each time? Your feet? Your groin, your stomach, how does your body react when you are not REALLY you? At the end of the day take notes about this. These notes will be the formal outline for this exercise. After that, EVERY DAY FOR THE NEXT 7 days you will pay attention to the SIGNS OF DISHONESTY in your voice and your body, and whenever you are not who you REALLY WANT TO BE at any moment in the day. Each time you are being polite to your boss, or the baby-sitter, or don't say FUCK because there's a child in the room, EACH TIME you are not you, CLENCH YOUR TOES! CLENCH THEM! Every time, CLENCH THEM! At the end of the day are your toes tired of this? Are they feeling BETTER maybe? Soak your feet in hot salt water and WRITE WRITE WRITE as quickly as you can, EACH NIGHT for 7 nights after a day of TOE CLENCHING DISHONESTY soak them in hot salt water and WRITE with the pace only a FURIOUS YOU would know how to do! OPEN YOUR EYES wider than they're used to being open and WRITE, WRITE WITHOUT BLINKING if you can. WRITE! At the end of 7 days take a long time staring at your feet, your toes, look at them. Stick them in your face if you can, right up to your face and look at them. Take a magnifying glass and look at your feet. For 7 days your toes have been taking the brunt of your dishonest actions. How does that look? Take notes. How does that feel? Take many notes. STICK YOUR TOES IN YOUR MOUTH if you can. How does that taste? Now, take ALL YOUR NOTES, and using THE FILTERS "ARREST" and "BASE" shape your poem.
That’s it— a 7 day toe exercise (lol). The goal is to access embodied truth and write those truths down, so feel free to make the exercise your own. Try a different body part, or 1 day instead of 7, but write with your body instead of your brain, so to speak.
This Week’s TLDR Prompt: Try imbuing an emotion into a specific body part throughout a day, e.g. CAConrad’s prompt focuses on dishonesty/performance and toes (!!). At the end of the day, examine that body part and write a poem. Feel free to share what emotion and body part you chose along with your poem, if you like.
This might seem ridiculous, simple, stupid, scary. Here’s some company.
Jess, on the shitstorms that we hold in our bodies:
“I’m human and so I’m often grossed out by myself, by my thoughts and actions, and scared of what people will think. But I’ve also found–through trial and error–that the best place for me to get to in a story is that gruesome little ledge.”
Mina Loy, on courage:
“If you are very frank with yourself and don't mind how ridiculous anything that comes to you may seem, you will have a chance of capturing the symbol of your direct reaction. The antique way to live and express life was to say it according to the rules. But the modern flings herself at life and lets herself feel what she does feel, then upon the very tick of the second she snatches the images of life that fly through the brain.”
I’m excited to try this, and I hope you are too. It will be weird. It will be good.
xoxo,
Catherine
I've been having vivid dreams at night, and working on short stories during the day. This prompt helped me realize, rather recently, that the way I write feels, in my body, like sight reading music. I feel like I'm racing against the clock, trying to scoop up as much approximate accuracy as I can get, before I lose. It's like, I know I'll definitely fuck up the actual music, but at least if I can sort of keep up, even if I forgo accurate pitch and only aim for rhythm, I can at least get a shape, or the gist of a thing, down. That's how I feel when I try to journal about my dreams that I'm on the verge of forgetting, and that's how I feel when I try to write a story. I've just recently figured this out. By approximation, I mean: I'll say something happened in a pool, knowing it wasn't a pool in the dream, but if that's the best word I can come up with on the fly without dwelling too long on accuracy and losing the rest of the dream, then I'll put it down and move on. My hope in doing this is that the whole will contain more than the sum of its inaccurate parts. Sometimes it does.
Here's my response to this prompt. I didn't do toes, but I did notice my body feels like it's sight reading a piece of music. I also did get some stuff down that felt true, even though it's all wrong, and you're not even supposed to write about dreams according to some people, but wth.
"Dreamt"
I was diving into a pool for fallen petals: massive, translucent things veined through with what looked like the blood vessels that, earlier in the week, my optometrist had taken pictures of and shown me, saying, look here, healthy eyes, good. Petals veined and pink, like the flowers falling from the tree under which Mulan and her father sat, after she failed her bridal exams. I’m diving for the sunken petals because there’s a tyrant coming who will be angry with someone if the pool floor is dirty, and I’ve decided to cover for them. The tyrant will rage if he catches me, but I’ll risk it. When I emerge, wet, I have the petals in my fist, and just as I’m about to climb out of the pool, the tyrant bursts through the gate, reeling and drunk. He doesn’t notice my fist of petals at first, and I quickly hide my hands in the gutter’s open mouth. We discuss the weather. Nice evening for a swim, he says. When he glances up at the sky, I throw my fist of crumpled petals out of the pool, and climb out. Shiver as a wind begins to blow, knocking fresh petals off the tree overhanging the pool. The sun has set, and the pool lights flicker on. Pink jelly boats float across the glowing. The tyrant leaves. By the time he returns, his pool floor will be littered once more with the newly fallen, and he will have no one to blame. Each breath of wind releases petals: sheaves of wide, soft cups. The tyrant will come back none the wiser. He will be struck by the floating petals, the image of a curved back resting on a liquid sheet, the soft hiss of lines meeting after a long fall. He will be struck, as I am, with the impossibility of proving what he suspects, that while his back was turned, small mercies were given out by small things, not particularly brave or good, diving and trying to cover for someone other than themselves.