Here's an Idea!

The Official Launch of The Hatchery

Photo by Cullan Smith on Unsplash

Friends, after last week’s post about Safe Hatcheries, you all got me thinking.

And, perhaps, reminiscing a bit, too.

Way back in eighth grade around the same time that I was anxiously standing before Mrs. Morris’s desk, clutching my story, nervous but crazy excited about my words getting read by someone other than me, I was asked to be a part of a small club at our school. It was called Power of the Pen. Once a week or month (that portion of the memory is left in fog) we gathered together after school. While all the sporty kids ran drills in the fields behind Troy Junior High, we wordsmiths sat in a circle of desks in a classroom and wrote.

This was the first time I was introduced to the word “prompt.” At the beginning of our club time, the teacher (was it dear Mrs. Morris perhaps? I wish I could recall…) would give each of us a piece of paper with instructions on it and then send us off to discover what literary gems we could dig up with it.

Begin a story with this first line: His mother placed the gift in front of him and urged him to open it. With trembling fingers, he did.

Write a poem that includes these five words: peak, cement, windy, blonde, forest.

Create a story whose title is: “To Be or Not To Be.”

Just like our classmates who were sweating it out doing wind sprints during their football practice, prepping for their weekend games, our prompt practices were meant to expand and strengthen our creative muscles for our Power of the Pen Tournaments.

Yes, you read that right: writing tournaments.

At an area school all the local chapters of Power of the Pen met for a competition. Good gracious, just envision it. All the bespeckled middle schoolers, kids who couldn’t throw a football spiral if their lives depended on it, gathering together to compete at what they were good at: telling stories. I could cry just thinking about it, knowing that spaces like this still exist.

On the day of the competition we were divided up into small groups with our fellow rival writers, ushered into quiet classrooms where we were presented with paper, pencil, and prompt, given our time limit, and then the countdown began.

Oh, the flush of nervousness I felt during my very first session as I stared down at the page! Would my imagination awaken? Would the words show up?

And then, in the blank black of my mind, I caught sight of a spark. And I knew if I kept throwing the kindling of words upon it, it would grow higher, hotter, brighter, till I had for myself a roaring blaze of a story. Oh, the thrill of it!

After a whole day of building these fires of creativity, the competition ended with the presentation of awards. For each prompt session, a winner was announced, who would then move onto a future tournament.

Let me say right here that I LOVE awards. And with no small amount of pride, friends, I am happy to report that I, the slightly overweight, pimpled, and shy teen that I was, won one such an award during my first ever Power of the Pen competition.

Thank you for the applause. I’m truly honored.

I have the newspaper clipping announcing my glorious achievement floating around in our attic somewhere, as well as the black, hardback journal with a gold emblem of a pen at its corner, which was presented to me as a trophy. If I rummage through my stash of relics one day and find them, I’ll offer up a picture here for you.

But this trip down memory lane just got me thinking about creating in community. And I caught the spark of an idea out of the corner of my mind’s eye. Let me explain.

I know not all of us around here are writers. But I firmly believe that if you are a human, you are creative. We all are in different ways. Maybe your creativity comes out in your cooking or gardening or home decorating or photography. And if you staunchly believe that you don’t have a creative bone in your body, well, take a minute to think about the things that truly delight you.

What makes you smile when you see it?

What activity do you do and lose track of the time while you’re doing it because it’s so gosh darn fun?

And, no, the answers to those questions are not scrolling on Instagram or bingeing Netflix, friends. Nice try, but you have far more potential than that.

I mean the stuff that delights you right down into your soul, that when you do it, you feel like a better person for having done so. That’s what I’m getting at here.

Last week I talked about the Safe Hatchery, the place where we can create without fear. And it got me wondering about creating one such space here at Nooks & Crannies.

Here’s the idea: once a month under the heading of The Hatchery, I’ll offer up a prompt for any and all who would like to participate. You can take that prompt and interpret it however you like. Maybe you respond with a picture or a poem or a song or a drawing or a casserole. And then we will use the comments down below to share our offerings with each other. If you have your own Substack or other website where you have your prompt response posted, copy and paste the link so we can all go see it and celebrate it with you.

Each Hatchery post will be available to comment on for as long as the internet exists, so if the prompt inspires you two months from now, share what you have then. There’s no time limit. The goal here is to build those creative muscles in each of us and then cheer each other on in our good work.

So what do you think? Are you game?

Let’s give it a test drive this week.

This week’s prompt is a simple one: Use the title, “A Son’s Request,” in whatever way you interpret it.

To cut the nervy tension in the room, I’ll go first:

A Son’s Request

Long after I should be deep
in my REM of sleep, dreaming
in the full color of a subconscious
land, I am sitting with him
watching a film that piqued
his philosophical interest and begged
to be watched with company.

I don’t do it to journey into
that landscape of questions
about what is real, who is
human, how does this all work?
These questions have no allure
for me.

It is the silhouette of him
beside me, his face aglow,
a boyish smile on his lips
that keeps me up past bedtime
because there is no dream
sweeter than this.

Alright, friends, now we’re off to the races. Or the fire building. Or the egg hatching. Or whatever you want to call it. The comments are open and ready. Let’s have some fun!