Fallen Fruit + Semicolon Tree Writing Exercise
By Haley Joy Harris
In poet Mary Ruefle’s chapter “On Beginnings” from Madness, Rack, and Honey, she quotes French poet and philosopher Paul Valéry—“the opening line of a poem, he said, is like finding a fruit on the ground, a piece of fallen fruit you have never seen before, and the poet’s task is to create the tree from which such a fruit would fall” (1-2). A few pages later, Ruefle writes “you might say a poem is a semicolon, a living semicolon, what connects the first line to the last, the act of keeping together that whose nature is to fly apart” (4).
For this generative writing exercise, we are going to collect fallen fruits and use them to reconstruct our very own semicolon tree poems.
To begin, generate a word bank of “fallen fruits.” These could be miscellaneous ponderings from your day, fragments of dreams, literal fruits, objects you’ve seen on the sidewalk, intrusive thoughts, jotted handwriting in your notebook that you now forget the context of, your most precious keepsakes, a phrase from a billboard, a song lyric that haunts you, etc. The words/phrases in your word bank should have the quality of being both hearty and bygone.
Group your fallen fruits into clusters, and then write these new clusters out as lists, each fallen fruit linked together by a semicolon. Consider order here, via intuition. Reorganize as needed.
What holds each cluster of fallen fruits together? What kind of tree could this be? Respond to each individual fallen fruit or cluster, putting yourself in conversation with it. Jot these thoughts down off to the side of your semi-colon-ed lists.
Then, wherever inspired, comb through your lists and replace semicolons with connective lines. These will be your branches! You may be surprised at what will connect one fallen fruit to another. Let yourself make leaps! And feel free to leave semicolons in place wherever needed.
Title your poem with the name of a tree.
Ruefle, Mary. Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures. Wave Books, 2012.
Questioning Our Sentences
By Assemay Almazbekkyzy
Hey writers,
Have you ever found yourself stuck at a certain sentence? When the story is not yet finished, but you can’t really see where it’s going from the last words you just wrote? I get blocked like that all the time, but recently I’ve developed a habit that helps me break out of it.
Take a look at a sentence. A sentence you’re stuck at, a sentence you like but can’t elaborate into a story, a beautiful sentence or an ugly sentence, a sentence that’s exciting or a sentence that’s boring. Try to make it short, though. Mine would be “He was sitting in a chair.” I think it’s a fairly uninspiring sentence. Very stale.
Now that you have your sentence, examine every word. He, was, sitting, in, a, chair. Now, go crazy — for each word, write a sentence that would question, elaborate on, or somehow interact with it.
"He was sitting in a chair. He didn’t find the chair comfortable.”
“He was sitting in a chair. He will be sitting in chairs for the rest of his life.”
“He was sitting in a chair. Sometimes she saw him standing on chairs.”
“He was sitting in a chair. He was in and out of the chair all the time.”
“He was sitting in a chair. The chair for him was a gaming chair in his house.”
“He was sitting in a chair. He preferred sitting on couches, cushions, floors, but he usually found himself sitting in chairs.”
You might feel an urge to disagree with the words, amplify them, or come up with analogies — follow that urge, and perhaps you’ll stumble upon something you’ll want to spend more time with. I think this little exercise helps me play with the language and break out of conventions, and I hope it’ll do something similar for you!
Really looking forward to meeting you this summer!
— Assemay
Poem as Meeting Place
By Megan Friedman
Recently, I’ve been thinking of my poems as meeting places. Or perhaps, more accurately, I’ve been thinking of my mind as a meeting place and the poem as an extension of my mind. As someone moves throughout the world, I believe that a mind is created out of sensory input, feelings, thoughts, dreams. When the mind is that of a poet, a poem can erupt out of this meeting place, acting as a meeting place of its own. I’ve noticed that this is especially true in my writing when I feel inspired by the world around me and the happenings of my day-to-day life. For example, in a series of a few days, I read Lisa Olstein’s Dream Apartment, attended an art opening for the painter Anne Buckwalter, and watched a 1974 Gordon-Matta Clark film with a friend. Each of these experiences occurring in conjunction with one another created a unique meeting place for thought and feeling which then culminated into a poem.
In reading Dream Apartment, I noticed how Olstein explores interior spaces — of the mind, body, self — and how these spaces are reflected in, distorted by, or opposite to an external environment. For Olstein, the external is depicted through images — frequently horses, oceans, sailors, and the other. Because I too am interested in these particular images and use them often in my own writing, I found I was able to relate to Olstein’s work on a thematic level. In the poem “Material Factors,” Olstein writes, “We grow tired of news / from the interior when / news from the interior / is the only news we know” (67). I found this poem, and these particular lines, to be a thesis of Dream Apartment, capturing the frustration of a body receiving "news" from its own "interior," and thus the concept of a ‘dream apartment’ itself. Something beyond representation, requiring an immersion of the exterior within the interior.
Importantly, as I was thinking about interior versus exterior in Olstein’s poems, I also attended Anne Buckwalter’s art opening at the Farnsworth Museum in Maine. Buckwalter was debuting her show Momentum, in which she explores interior spaces and femininity. This exhibition felt in line with Olstein’s poetry and had me thinking about "the interior," and the freedom we have in being ourselves when no one is watching. I am thinking about how the self can be whole outside of relation with others, and how it can find itself in relation with itself. Moreover, on the same day, I was talking with a friend about Gordon Matta-Clark’s 1974 work "Splitting," in which a house is split cleanly and completely in half all the way through the foundation, walls, roof, everything. We watched footage of "Splitting," and it was really crazy to watch light filter through the center — in a straight line from top to bottom — of a house. From this experience, I began to consider how selfhood and the splitting of a self is a reflection of how one moves between the interior mind and exterior world.
Through all of these experiences, the thoughts and feelings that followed, and the inspiration found through interacting with art, I was able to create a poem. I see that poem as a meeting place, and I think my understanding of poetry as a meeting place has opened my eyes to what poetry can be and do.
My Writing Space/Routine
My writing space is, by design, unstimulating. As you can see from the photo, the desk is the basic white model from Ikea and the green lamp was purchased a decade ago for five dollars. There is a grey mug in the corner that says “Grace Chorale of Brooklyn” which I typically turn towards the wall so as to prevent myself from being able to read the words. I do keep a stack of my favorite books nearby, but often on the floor so that they are out of my line of vision. If I could get away with just the ipad and the wireless keyboard beneath it, I would, but there are limits to how much dreariness even I can tolerate.
The point of this is not some secular form of puritanism nor a devotion to minimalist aesthetics. The reason for my desk’s appearance comes from a desire to remove distractions, to create a simple space so that my mind can be entertained by only the blank page. The modern world is a distracting place and my desk’s only purpose is to create a quiet escape to write, nothing more. To that end, my writing habit is an extension of my desk. I wake up at 5:30 in the morning when it’s quiet, no parents or family there to disturb me, and let the early morning light creep in slowly through an open window. It is cold and I warm myself up at the computer, typing for hours. At the end of my writing day, 9:30 AM, I close my ipad and turn my keyboard off until the next morning, when it starts all over again.
This is not the only way to become a writer, this is just my way. Nothing I’ve mentioned might be applicable to your own writing habit and that’s alright. It is the space that works for me, which is all it’s intended to do. My desk is an extension of myself, it serves the purpose of pulling the words out of my brain, kicking and screaming if necessary. It’s about the page and what you fill it up with; how you do it is up to you.
A Favourite Narrator
By Sarah Ahmad
Something a lot of my favourite books have in common is that they are narrated by an intensely memorable and observant character who is obsessive toward their own interiority, and (intentionally or unintentionally) sometimes rip-roaringly funny. Part of the joy is recognizing something of myself in the characters, but the opposite is even more rewarding — when I am challenged by the character’s worldview, or encounter something in them that leads to the opposite of recognition, a sense of surprise, a new way of seeing the world.
Last summer, a book I have had on my shelves for almost fifteen years decided it was time to announce itself, and I ended up meeting one of my favourite narrators in its pages. The book is Dodie Smith’s 1948 classic, I Captured A Castle. It is narrated by seventeen-year-old Cassandra, who diligently journals her every thought through the months her family moves to a decaying castle in the English countryside in the 1930s. There’s a lot of drama around falling in love in the novel, but the thread I find a lot more interesting is how Cassandra schemes to get her father — a writer who published a modernist classic he is famous for, but who has been struggling to write for many years since — to write again. I won’t spoil it with details, but I love the way the ruinous castle and the cast of characters feel atmospheric and present through her narration. When I’m writing toward something, I always begin with a sentence that says where I am at the moment, what I see, and am surrounded by. The first line of I Capture A Castle felt like a familiar hand reaching out to me. Cassandra begins, “I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.”
Some other books that I love for their narrators are Angela Carter’s macabre and wickedly funny collection of fairytale retellings, The Bloody Chamber, Bohumil Hrabal’s slim, strange, and human novel Too Loud A Solitude, and Diane Seuss’s Frank:sonnets, which is a poetry collection, so I’m pushing the “narrator” category a bit here. But its pages are so abundant with Seuss’s singular and brash emotional honesty and intelligence that I have to sneak it into this little list.
Seven of Cups: Dreams, Visions, Imaginations
Regular practitioners of the Tarot often report that no matter how much they shuffle their cards, they keep pulling the same card over and over again. For my mother, who is plagued with the shackles of a midlife crisis, that card is the Devil. For me, who has been working on the same novel for three years, that card is the Seven of Cups.
Look at the card closely: a silhouetted figure is amazed (or frightened) by what manifests in front of them. Seven wonders fill seven floating cups. What does it all mean? Why does a skull appear on the cup with the laurel wreath? Why a castle, a veil glowing red?
The action here takes place entirely in the imagination. These are seven dreams, seven visions, seven imaginations.
Many people say this is a card of indecision. Too many dreams, not enough action. But others view this card as a salvation: “Maybe fantasies are exactly what a person needs,” wrote the late poet and tarot specialist, Rachel Pollock. “We can’t change our lives without first imagining other possibilities.”
The same, I think, is true for writing. We can’t grow as artists without first breaking free from certainty and control. To imagine new possibilities, we must train ourselves to become open to recognizing the strange, the confusing, and the contradictory—and welcoming it with open arms.
When I remember a dream, I write it down. Every detail. No matter how nonsensical, boring, or disturbing. When I hear someone say something that catches my attention, I write it down without judgement. I don’t distinguish the dream from reality. For me, it’s all images. I fill hundreds of cups with them. Then, when I sit down to write, I pour them all out. I make a potion.
It's easier said than done, this practice. Many experts of the tarot suggest that when a card is drawn repeatedly, it means that the querent is not listening closely enough. The lesson is not being learned. I expect to draw the Seven of Cups for the rest of my life. I open my eyes to the strange only to find that the mystery widens. And widens. And widens.
Surprises at Juniper: Horror, Beauty, and Writing Across Genres
By Scout Turkel
In the summer of 2023, while working as a Creative Writing Instructor for the Juniper Institute for Young Writers, I facilitated Botanical Writing, a Writing Lab designed to encourage writers to think about writing as a “cultivation” practice, one that follows and plays with nature’s rhythms.
Together, we spent half of each class outside, writing and exploring the UMass-Amherst campus — a place full of ponds, greenhouses, lush trees, dumpsters, students, blue skies, and geese. We acted as “writers in residence” in these different kinds of nature, allowing the surrounding ecology to influence and provoke our writing. During one early class, we conducted a “beauty search” on campus, aiming to invent — in poetry — a new definition of “beauty” that could speak with specificity to our unique surroundings.
After our “beauty search,” the young writers in Botanical Writing gathered under a tree outside of South College to share their results: with near-unanimous agreement, our Lab declared that conventional beauty was of little interest to us. Instead, macabre was in. If we truly cared about The Beautiful, it was to be the grosser kinds of beauty found in the trash heap, the seemingly random aggression observed among geese, and the strange way the shadows looked in the late afternoon, pulled in long, shifting forms across the Old Chapel’s stone walls. We still finished our poems, but in this new register. A register that, for many of the writers in our Lab, provided the impetus for future horror stories and totally unnerving pieces of speculative fiction. This became one of the governing principles in our classroom: the scarier the better.
I could never have anticipated our arrival at this collective aesthetic. But I’m so glad that it’s where we landed. The works emergent from my Writing Lab never ceased to delight and enlighten me, which, on its own, is no surprise. The writers at Juniper are committed to their craft, are adventurous, and are thoughtful, energetic collaborators. But what got invented during Botanical Writing — a new understanding of beauty, of delight and horror, of nature — was unquestionably, and thankfully, a true surprise. One specific to these writers, at this time, and in this place.