Roll the Dice

Put your music on shuffle. Then, write a scene or story idea that combines the first song that plays and the first image to appear on this randomize list of photographs. Keep going—pairing the second song with the second photograph, etc.—until you have written five scenes and/or story ideas. Provide your beginnings or keep going until you have a full story (or poem or any other kind of writing).

How to Write a Sestina

The sestina originated among the troubadours of medieval France’s Provence region, and the modern thirty-nine line form is attributed to one of these traveling poet entertainers of the twelfth century, Arnaut Daniel. Daniel’s sestina form was admired by Dante Alighieri, who introduced it to Italian poetry as well.

The sestina is one of the more challenging forms of the era, and perhaps that is one reason it is also a very fulfilling form to craft a poem in – especially when it comes together well. Like many French forms, like the villanelle and the triolet, the sestina is very strictly patterned. Unlike these other forms however, the sestina in its original form was not written using rhymes.

Instead it uses a set of six ending-words in six different patterns of six-line stanzas (sestets), followed by a three-line envoi which uses all six of these refrained words. This gives the poem its thirty-nine lines. The sestina is a metered form, and as long as the pattern is maintained any meter may be employed; in the English language, iambic pentameter is the most common meter chosen.

The Pattern

If we look at the ending words for each line, and label them with the letters A to F, the first six line stanza has the pattern:

A B C D E F

To generate the pattern for the second stanza, we take these letters and starting with the final one (F), we alternate picking up letters from the front and then the back until we have used all six. This gives us the following pattern for the second stanza:

F A E B D C

This diagram may better help to explain the pattern:

We repeat this same technique to create four more patterns, each one reordering the letters from the one above. Our resulting six stanza patterns look like this:

Stanza 1 – A B C D E F
Stanza 2 – F A E B D C
Stanza 3 – C F D A B E
Stanza 4 – E C B F A D
Stanza 5 – D E A C F B
Stanza 6 – B D F E C A

The final three line envoi is done many ways. The only hard and fast rule here, is that each line must end in one of the six words, and contain another inside, so that all six are used in these three lines. Purists will say that the pattern should be:

(B) E, (D) C, (A) F

This is how almost all sestinas were done during the height of their popularity, but since the 19th century poets have made some changes, and now the most common patterns for the envoi lines are (A) B, (C) D, (E) F and (F) A, (E) B, (D) C.

The Circular Sestina

One of the changes that came about in the 19th century was the introduction of the Circular, or Rhyming Sestina. In order to make a rhyming pattern, two sets of three rhyming words are used: Lines A,C, & E rhyme, as do lines B, D, & F.

To accommodate the rhyming of these lines in alternating ababab and bababa schemes, a new sestina pattern was created:

Stanza 1 – A B C D E F
Stanza 2 – F A D E B C
Stanza 3 – C F E B A D
Stanza 4 – D C B A F E
Stanza 5 – E D A F C B
Stanza 6 – B E F C D A
Envoi     –  (A) F, (B) E, (C) D

An Example

The sestina has, since the resurgence of its popularity in the 1930s, become a vehicle more often used to produce lighthearted and humorous results. Puns have always been at home in the form, and sometimes, the tales they tell are simple, yet strong:

Sestina
By Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979)

September rain falls on the house.
In the failing light, the old grandmother
sits in the kitchen with the child
beside the Little Marvel Stove,
reading the jokes from the almanac,
laughing and talking to hide her tears.

She thinks that her equinoctial tears
and the rain that beats on the roof of the house
were both foretold by the almanac,
but only known to a grandmother.
The iron kettle sings on the stove.
She cuts some bread and says to the child,

It’s time for tea now; but the child
is watching the teakettle’s small hard tears
dance like mad on the hot black stove,
the way the rain must dance on the house.
Tidying up, the old grandmother
hangs up the clever almanac

on its string. Birdlike, the almanac
hovers half open above the child,
hovers above the old grandmother
and her teacup full of dark brown tears.
She shivers and says she thinks the house
feels chilly, and puts more wood in the stove.

It was to be, says the Marvel Stove.
I know what I know, says the almanac.
With crayons the child draws a rigid house
and a winding pathway. Then the child
puts in a man with buttons like tears
and shows it proudly to the grandmother.

But secretly, while the grandmother
busies herself about the stove,
the little moons fall down like tears
from between the pages of the almanac
into the flower bed the child
has carefully placed in the front of the house.

Time to plant tears, says the almanac.
The grandmother sings to the marvelous stove
and the child draws another inscrutable house.

This poem follows the classic sestina pattern, although the poet chose to be a bit loose with the meter, and so the tale of the child and grandmother becomes a bit less sober than it might have become had she stayed in metric form.

Crafting One of Your Own

The sestina is often used to tell a story, and that story can be in any genre. I have written westerns, romances and even a comedy using the form, and while it is a challenge, like anything else it becomes easier as you practice. To craft a sestina, and indeed any structured form, I have a process, and that is what I would like to share with you.

The first step is to decide on your end-words! What I want to do is come up with words that have more meaning than one so as to play with how they’re used. Begin by writing down your six words and lettering them A-F. Follow the directions until you have the end words for every line. Then fill in backwards…

Suit up and go for a walk alone in your neighborhood with a notebook (making sure to maintain at least six feet of distance between you and others of course). As you walk, try to notice as much as you can that you’ve never noticed before. Is there a strange water stain on a building you’ve never seen before? An old tree that has a quirky bend to its branches? A wall plaque commemorating a building you never knew about? A bench that is so dirty or lopsided no one would ever sit in it? Catalogue each new neighborhood feature. Now layer in other senses: What is the ambient noise like? If you touch an object (through gloves if you prefer) what do you feel? Can you smell anything? What does the air taste like? Is it warm and sunny or cool evening or drizzly? Finally, what are the emotions associated with this place? Placid, frightening, nostalgic, sad, lonely, joyous?

Now ask yourself this question—what is the story here? There is a memory, story, or poem locked in what you’re seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, and tasting that needs to be told. It doesn’t just need to be told: It needs YOU to be the teller.

Now start writing!

The Year is 2090…

…And you find a diary about the “quarantine experience” of 2020. Reflect, from the vantage of the future, on the time we are currently living (2020) and how the world is different “now” (in 2090) as a result. Genre? Author’s choice.

Our New Reality

Zoom parties, window gazing, virtual happy hours, watch parties. These are the new normal for many of us. Others risk their own health by braving the empty streets and buildings as essential workers. Some of us still have salaries. Others have no source of income. Some of us are more alone than we’ve ever been. Others live on top of one another. What used to be a given—human interaction, running errands, commuting to work, meeting for happy hour—these feel, for many of us, like a distant memory.

Let’s reach out across the void to one another, and try to put our experiences in this “new normal” into words. What are our sorrows and triumphs as we rearrange our entire social lives?

Forgotten Landscapes
Contributed by Steven Mayers

Every roll of photos, especially when they were taken on film, has a few shots that are either taken by accident, catching a clip of someone’s head, the photographer’s shoe, or a treetop. There are also photos that are out of focus. Some are reflections in puddles. As we shuffle though our boxes of photos, these forgotten landscapes and random images usually get sifted to the bottom of the box, and sometimes stay there for years, sometimes until someone dies, and their relatives come to clean out the closet.

Today, take a photo from the pile, or search for an out-of-focus “mistake” photo from deep in your camera roll on your phone, preferably one that you forget taking and don’t remember when it was taken, and try to put yourself, or someone else, into the landscape. How dies it feel to be there? How is the temperature? How does it smell? Do you hear sounds? You could focus on the physical traits of a place you find particularly beautiful, or imagine an interaction that is taking place in his scene.

After grounding yourself there, write without stopping for twenty minutes. If you’re inspired, write a story, a poem, a non-fiction piece grounded in the landscape.

“I was a maiden in this versicolor plain. / I watched it change. / Withstood that change, / the infidelities / of light, the solar interval, the shift of time, / the shift from farm to / town. / I had a man that pressed me down / into the soil. I was that man. I was that town.”

– D.A. Powell, “Tender Mercies,” in Useless Landscapes

How to Be Bored
Contributed by Sean Kim

Are you bored? It’s often considered a hated state of being for what it lacks, which is stimulation and distraction. It’s in this way we prefer the action movie over slower paced dramas, beat heavy music over ambient drone, dynamic conversation over the awkward silence. Yet boredom could also be an inability to appreciate the moment, in the same way John Cage emphasized the appreciation of silence, because even silence is a sound that bears hearing. In this time of quarantine, as we find ourselves with more time than we’re prepared or even capable of filling, write a poem, story, essay, or memoir on the question of “How to be bored.”

Under quarantine, many of us are cooking to stay sane. Recipes are flying around social media; flour and baker’s yeast are growing scarce; and elaborate, homemade desserts are accruing in refrigerators as we wait out the pandemic. Our relationship to food and cooking is changing in response to circumstances, as we now need to prepare most-to-all of our meals. Whether cooking is our “zen” or the gauntlet we need to get through to keep ourselves and our families from starving to death, food now has a newly fraught or newly rewarding place in our lives. In an effort to engage food’s novel primacy in our lives—and to acknowledge that Easter, Passover, and Ramadan will happen while we huddle in place with less community than we are used to—this week’s challenge is to craft a story, poem, personal essay, creative non-fiction piece, or any genre of writing that revolves around a recipe. It can be for anything (including cocktails!) and the only rule is that you include the recipe in your post. So:

[Recipe Name/Title of Piece]

Yield: Length of Your Choosing (within reason)
Prep time: [hours and minutes]
Total time: [prep + cook time]

Ingredients:

1. 1 tsp form

2. 2 tbsp Setting (or to taste)

3. 3 cups Character

4. A pinch of metonymy (subst. synecdoche or simile)

5. A soupçon of je ne c’est quoi

Directions:

Mix them all together in whatever relationship the piece of writing warrants but don’t forget to include the actual recipe in toto or as a link! For inspiration:

A Loaf of Poetry
by Naoshi Koriyama

you mix
the dough
of experience
with
the yeast
of inspiration
and knead it well
with love
and pound it
with all your might
and then
leave it
until
it puffs out big
with its own inner force
and then
knead it again
and
shape it
into a round form
and bake it
in the oven
of your heart

Isolation Haikus

The traditional Japanese poetic form, the haiku, is a study in compression. Just three lines, seventeen syllables, it contains a little starburst of associations and emotions, and the constraints might work well with our own sense of constraint and longing while in quarantine. Moreover, haikus ask us to pay close attention to the natural world, and writing them can be a form of meditation. They align closely with the Japanese concept of mono no aware, or “the sadness of the temporary,” the aesthetic practice of simultaneously enjoying something ephemeral and mourning its loss. Whether you want to follow the strict guidelines and formatting of traditional haiku or privilege the spirit over the letter, this week’s challenge is to write one haiku for each day of the week. For sticklers, the rules of traditional haiku are below, with some examples (those translated from Japanese do not follow the syllabic rules):

1. Haikus are three lines long

   • 5 syllables in the first line

   • 7 syllables in the second line

   • 5 syllables in the third line

2. Haikus refer in some way to the natural world, and the way our senses filter the natural world

3. Each haiku evokes a season of the year

Examples:

An old silent pond...
A frog jumps into the pond,
splash! Silence again.

—(Matsuo Basho, 1644-1694)

O snail
Climb Mount Fuji,
But slowly, slowly!

—(Kobayashi Issa, 1763-1828)

After killing
a spider, how lonely I feel
in the cold of night!

—(Masaoka Shiki, 1867-1902)