Janice Eidus, author and Writing It Real correspondent, currently teaches creative nonfiction for the University of New Orleans and uses writing prompts with her students based on the essay anthology In Brief, a book I discussed in my December 16, 2004 article. This week, she shares those prompts with us, and I offer a demonstration of how to use a couple of them for generating personal essays.

Whether you have a copy of In Brief and use the essays as models or go ahead and see where your mind takes you when you read Janice’s prompts by themselves, you will find ideas for recording your personal experience in ways you might not have considered.

Since the first two essays of In Brief are online at W.W. Norton’s site, I will use the prompts Janice created from those essays to demonstrate a way of combining the prompts with a technique called clustering to gather images and ideas for writing personal essays.

In the list below, Janice’s first prompt suggests you read Harriett Doerr’s “Low Tide at Four” and “write a piece exploring the nature of memory.” Doerr, you will see when you read the essay, opens this way:

What I remember of those summers at the beach is that every afternoon there was a low tide at four. I am wrong, of course. Memory has outstripped reality. But before me as I write, in all its original colors, is a scene I painted and framed and now, almost fifty years later, bring to light.

To do my own essay on the nature of memory, I have to comb the banks of my memories and see which ones hold some interest for me to write about. Then I might explore something about the nature of memory.

So, I put the word memory in the center of my cluster. From there I allow myself to think of memories as they come: walking to Kindergarten with Jackie and Jerry and Karen, drinking juice out of fresh picked oranges with a plastic straw when I was a kid visiting my grandparents in Florida and then with my own kids in Arizona, writing poetry on stormy days when I was new to Seattle and sat alone in a café overlooking Elliott Bay, playing in the snow in New Jersey with our family dog Fannie, and planting raspberry stalks given to me by my son’s elementary school teacher, for instance. For the ones that interest me I might make little clusters off of them: planting the raspberry stalks might lead to remembering my son’s red parka, our guinea pig named Mr. Nielson, the gold fish that died, the brown cabinets in the pantry of the house we lived in, the way five o’clock pm is my constant memory of being a young mother of grade school children — just before dinner, the kids coming into the kitchen, something simmering on the stove, the joy of a guest for dinner. I might remember particular details about the guinea pig or the games the kids played, who might have been playing with them, the gymnastics classes my daughter could walk to, the pet store around the corner from our house.

The words, circles and lines on the page, whether I had worked with only of my memories or many, would resemble a vine full of grapes and hopefully sprawl all over the white space.

Next, I would start a freewrite imitating Doerr:

What I remember of those years on North 82nd Street are the early evenings when macaroni and cheese was the only food my children asked for.  They must have asked for other food and I must have made it and introduced other entrees they’d never heard of, but in my memory the elbow noodles are in the boiling water every night and I am grating cheddar cheese. The large yellow Pyrex bowl that used to be my mother’s is on the counter ready for the mix. I will get away with adding some pepper, black flecks in the yellow meal like sprinkling of ash drifted from a barbeque. Mr. Neilson the guinea pig is scampering in his cage on the floor leading to the basement steps. He has been out all afternoon in my son’s room but now he is reunited with his pellets. I am in love for the third time since my divorce and maybe this man is coming to dinner. I can remember the beginning of that romance with so much happiness that I forget the sorrow of its ending. I have learned how this is possible from losses far greater than romance.

It is early evening. My son wears his red nylon parka and is out in the backyard by the bare raspberry stalks. Now he has two quail living in a chicken wire house.  They lay little eggs he loves to carry to us in the kitchen…

I believe that I would continue writing happy memories that bring the lost romantic partner and my son, who died at age 25, together into this happy time I am remembering. I believe that I might learn more about the way time allows us to open memories with different emotions than we might have thought possible.

Here is another example of how I might use Janice’s prompts. In the third one in the list below, Janet suggests that you write a piece in which a color is the central metaphor/image in the way that Marjorie Sander did in her essay Rhapsody in Green. When you read the essay, you’ll see it opens like this:

A few years ago, when I was married and living uneasily in Florida, I believed that there was, in a town twelve miles away, a little restaurant with green upholstery—a certain green—that served the best breakfast. This restaurant, which I thought existed at a bend in the road near some railroad tracks, had that sheerly impossible quality we sometimes ascribe to material things—often to restaurants, sometimes to whole cities we can’t seem to get back to. If we could only get there again, we think, our lives would be saved, or a deep, nagging mystery solved at last. Surely you’ve heard people go on this way, rhapsodically, about an armchair they sat in once on a Thursday when they were twelve, or about the smell of sausage in an English pub on a rainy day in March 1957. Some apparently trivial things appear to contain the sublime, and there’s no explaining this to anyone—nor any getting over it. Even Proust wore out his friends, trying.

To work with Janice’s prompt to “Write a piece in which a color is the central metaphor/image,” I put the world “color” in the center of my page, circled it, and then wrote down the first color that popped into my mind. I circled that color and connected that circle with a line to the central circle on the page. I clustered around that color the images that came to mind. I said mauve and clustered phrases like: “the color I never thought I’d paint walls,” “reminds me of the name Maude,” “invented by mistake” and “is wearing purple maudlin” “something like lavender.” Next, I clustered off the phrases yielding more information. For “is wearing purple maudlin,” I wrote “my lilac sweater with pills all over it,” “itchy,” “pansies in the garden,” “rockery flowers,” “packaging on mineral make up.” I looked up the color mauve on line for more information and wrote, “When I think of mauve, I think of invention. I wrote about the invention of the color and my own inventive nature and how this color purple makes me think of myself in ways other colors, including other colors of purple, don’t. If I hadn’t gotten anywhere with “mauve,” I’d have written down the name of a different color and circled it and connected it with the word “color” in the middle of the page and let my associations with this word flow. I’d do another and another, until I felt I had an interesting topic to explore by writing about a color.

As you read over the prompts, center on the ones that grab you. Trust that you have a connection to the prompt because it is calling something out of you. Using the technique of clustering will help you find the material the prompt you resonate with suggests. If you read the essays in In Brief, you’ll see how master essayists have invented and utilized diverse strategies and you’ll gain confidence that you can, too.

Here they are:

Prompts Inspired By In Brief: Short Takes on the Personal, edited by Judith Kitchen & Mary Paumier Jones
by Janice Eidus

1) Read “Low Tide At Four,” by Harriet Doerr
Write a piece exploring the nature of memory

2) Read ” Rhapsody in Green,” by Marjorie Sandor
Write a piece in which a color is the central metaphor/image

3) Read “Gullywasher,” by Jonathan Raban
Write a piece in which weather is the central metaphor/image

 4) Read “Good Workers,” by John T. Price
Write a piece about a job that was, or is, extremely important to you
Write a piece exploring the nature of work

5) Read “One Liar’s Beginnings,” by Brady Udall
Write a piece exploring the meaning of truth
Write a piece about a lie that you, or someone you know, once told

6) Read “Accident,” by Seamus Deane
Write about a time during which you experienced extremely mixed and complicated emotions

7) Read “Very Narrow,” by Anne Carson
Write a love story

8) Read “Adjustments” by Jeanne Brinkman Grinnam
Write about the nature of Time
Write a piece in which a particular mechanical object is the central metaphor/image

9) Read “Nearing 90,” by William Maxwell
Write a piece exploring your feelings about the age you are now

10) Read “Dealing With The Discovery of Death …,” by Ariel Dorfman
Write a piece about your relationship to some aspect of politics and/or government

11) Read “A Missing Star,” by Paul West
Write a piece exploring the nature of death

12) Read “Parnassus,” by Albert Goldbarth, and “Thread,” by Stuart Dybek
Write a piece exploring your relationship to religion and/or spirituality

13) Read “In Between,” by Kinereth Gensler
Write a piece about a time in your life when you felt like an outsider

14) Read “A Sense Of Water,” by William Kloefkorn, “Fury And Grace,” by Pattiann Rogers, and “Swimming With Canoes,” by John McPhee
Write a piece with water as the central metaphor/image

15) Read “Waking Dreams,” by Edwidge Danticat
Write a piece about a particular dream that you had (a one-time-only dream or a recurrent dream)

16) Read “A Sense Of Wonder,” by Dionisio D. Martinez
Write a piece in which film, in general, or a particular film, or an image from a particular film, is the central metaphor/image

17) Read “Messages,” by Andre Dubus
Write a piece about a missed message, or a missed connection, or a missed opportunity

18) Read “e-mail,” by Janice Best
Write a piece in which email, and/or computers, and/or the internet, is the central metaphor/image

19) Read “Infectious Reading,” by Charles Baxter

Write a piece exploring the significance of books and/or reading in your life

20) Read “Come Eat,” by Patricia Hampl, and “Bread,” by Jane Brox
Write a piece about a favorite food
Write a piece about a particular meal that holds special meaning for you

21) Read “Clip From A Winter Diary,” by Kelly Cunnane
Write a piece exploring the rewards and/or the sacrifices of parenting

22) Read “Missing,” by Celine Geary

Write a piece about the loss of a particular love

23) Read “At Last, Her Laundry’s Done,” by Kathleen Norris

Write a piece about a household chore

24) Read “Garden Of Envy,” by Jamaica Kincaid

Write a piece about a garden, real or imagined

25) Read “The Host,” by William Heyen, “Kani Wa Kora …,” by James Alan McPherson, “Bobcats,” by James Kilgo, and “The Indian Dog,” by N. Scott Momaday
Write about a particular animal that means something special to you

26) Read “Desire,” by David Shields
Write about an object or person you once fiercely desired

27) Read “One Afternoon,” by John Rosenthal, and “Frank Sinatra’s Gum,” by Kelly Simon
Write about a song (or songs), or a singer (or singers), that have special meaning for you

28) Read “Considering The Lilies,” by Rebecca McClanahan
Write about a particular item of clothing that has special meaning for you
Write about your relationship to clothes, in general

29) Read “The End Of Summer,” by Kimberly Gorall, and “Fallout,” by Dawn Morano
Write about a time when you felt betrayed by someone you trusted

30) Read “Western Union,” by Michael Blumenthal
Write about your truest “home”

31) Read “Man Of Letters,” by Guy Lebeda
Write about an important letter that you’ve written or received

32) Read “Dirt Roads,” by Mary Clearman Blew
Write a piece in which you explore the nature of grief

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I am happy to announce that I will be teaching along with Janice Eidus in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico this August 22-28. You can read more about our workshops at http://www.sanmiguelworkshops.com/workshops.php and more about the city of San Miguel de Allende at http://www.internetsanmiguel.com/.