Does It Come with a Moist Towelette?

lizshine74by lizshine74

In Poetry.

moist towelette

If you haven’t noticed, I’ve been posting daily prompts for poem-a-day on Substack (Notes) and Instagram. Last year, I gathered a list of friends and sent prompts out to a select email group. I’ve loved making these prompts to share with you all. This is the latest phase in a practice I’ve been calling home since…oh, maybe 2006 or so? I started over with Robert Lee Brewer at Writer’s Digest. And when April rolls around each year, there is just no question: my heart says yes! Chris has been joining me for a number of years (working on lyrics), as well as a few local friends And now, this year, some writer friends I’ve made over on Inked Voices (*waves*) have joined the band.

I’ve kept up with poem-a-day even in the long interval of years during which I convinced myself that I was a fiction writer, and not a real poet. I only wrote poems for fun, or for myself, or at best to share on this blog back when it was a WordPress. Even then, I showed up for poetry every April. Before I go much further here, I’m going to drop the invite and the link to a sharing opportunity at the end of the month. If you are writing along with me (or, maybe today is the day you start writing along with me), I’m going to host a Zoom social, Wednesday, April 30 at 6:00 P.M. PST. Hopefully, I’ll be Zooming from my back patio. (Come on, sunshine!) Wherever I tune in from, I hope you will show up and share how the month went for you, and share a poem or two. I’ll have some categories for sharing (taking suggestions): favorite poem, obviously; but also, the one that challenged you most; the one that brings you joy, or made you laugh. The evening will be for sharing and celebrating all the words written during the month of April. I’m putting the Zoom link here, and will repost it throughout the month.

As I try to put my finger on what it is that keeps me coming back every year, makes this practice such a non-negotiable, a moment comes to mind from yesterday morning. I was in my classroom during my planning period with my co-teacher busting out something that was due while also bantering about our kids, the job, our writing lives. My colleague broke in with, “Do you have a moist towelette?” That one phrase sent me reeling back to summer of 1984, in Aberdeen, a bucket of extra crispy chicken and mashed potatoes in the house my aunt lived in with the red shag carpet and an oil painting in oranges, yellows, browns, and blacks ala 1970s America. Why had I associated moist towelette with Colonel Sanders? Well, it seems that the “Wet-Nap” has been in partnership with KFC since the 1960s. But for me, the moist towelette is a time machine, probably especially since the 1980s was probably the last time I visited KFC (I rebelled and became vegetarian in 1988 and have stood my ground since.

What does this have to do with poetry? I’m not sure I would have made this time leap in my imagination at another time. It’s April and I have opened all the doors. Poetry insists on the imaginative power of a single word or phrase more than any other literary form. It’s spring, the light is coming back, green things are becoming green again, the ducks are walking two by two down the sidewalk—why not throw open all the doors? Why not spend a little bit of time each day seeing where your imagination might take you. It’s not too late to join me. There’s no rules here. No big deal whether you write 30 poems or 3 poems or 37.

I also work as a writing coach and love helping writers gain confidence, set goals, and develop their work. For more information on coaching, email me at eatyourwords.lizshine@gmail.com.

lizshine74

lizshine74

Liz Shine teaches high school English, writes, edits, and coaches other writers from her home in Olympia, WA. When she begins to feel overwhelmed by it all, she simply looks up at Mount Rainier in the distance and gets back to work. If that fails, she heads to the ocean. She is a founding editor at Red Dress Press. Her Substack Make Time is her gift to writers, like her, trying to magic time in this crazy, busy world. All of those posts are cross-posted on the blog here. You can see more of her writing at lizshine.com and find her on Instagram {@lizshine.writer} cooking, traveling, and in other ways seeking moments of awe. She has been an active participant in communities of writers since the early 1990s. She’s learned that two things feel truly purpose-driven in life: writing and coaching other writers. In the in between (because one cannot be driving for a purpose every moment), she enjoys looking for wonder and connection. She is a lifelong yoga student, an enthusiastic walker along streets and trails, and an amateur gardener and vegetarian cook. She lives in Olympia, WA. She believes in the power of practice and has been practicing writing since some time in the early 90s when she became an adult in the rain-soaked city of Aberdeen. Writing began with journaling, as a way to understand a confusing, sometimes violent coming-of-age. She writes mostly fiction, some nonfiction, and poetry, and holds an MFA from Pacific Lutheran University’s Rainier Writers Workshop. She is a founding editor at Red Dress Press.