Student Prompts

The following are writings from writing workshop participants who followed several given prompts. These prompts can be applied for my thesis curriculum when the students are working on generating ideas for their essays.

 

To my workshop participants:

Thank you all for participating and allowing me to share your work!

Exercises for Generating First Drafts
  • What haunts you?
  • What irritates you?
  • What are your obsessions?
  • What do you wish to forget?
  • What will you become?
  • When were you misunderstood?
  • How would you describe your class, race, and ethnicity?
  • Where do you belong?

 

  • Where would you most like to be?

"Tonight, I am exactly where I would most like to be.  Shunning family and friends, ignoring pressing concerns and mundane responsibilities, I sit in a circle of faces I've never seen and may never see again, searching for that elusive entity that defies description, but can only be alluded to as "the voice."  The voice stirs and rumbles deep in the gut, prodding me forward in a seemingly endless quest for the Holy Grail of self-expression.  Armed with pen and paper, my comrades and I press forward as we attempt to push through the wall of pretentionism that guards our treasure and blocks our imagination."

―Tom Scrubbs

"I would most like to be in the future seeing who and what I become [sic].  I wear many hats.  Soldiers [sic], poet, war hero, lover, officer, student, counselor, son.  Which role will rock like alligator shoes?  Which path will I pursue?  The future knows and that is where i wanna go.  I want to meet up to grow and live in bliss.  Kill the last terrorist the most humane way, blessed day!  I want to go to the future far ahead, see what the children of today make of themselves, bright or bleak gravel or streaks of gold. I want to go to the future."

― Darnell Johnson

  • Describe your first apartment or an any apartment you lived in
An apartment I lived in...
 
It was always shady when I made my way home in the late afternoon.   Even though my apartment was on the East side of the street, the sun would be gone down behind the greystone houses and apartments all in a row across the street from where I lived.  I can't remember the street address any more, but there were 4 numbers... 1632 Stanley Street or 1426.  I lived almost at the top of the block and the walk was a good climb up from Sherbrooke St. 
My one room apartment on Stanley Street was as urban as you can get but there was still a bush or two framing several of the doorways.  The stone and the doors and the occasional gateways; the large solid door handles and the marble and stone entrance ways were all comforting and solid, and their age and history always made me feel rich with atmosphere even if I paid less than $400. a month to live in my one-room in this exquisite old house that had been divided into apartments.  Beyond the 12 foot heavy black door - so thick I left the street noises behind with certainty once the door closed behind me - was a rod iron gate that opened with a key, or a buzzer from the apartments.  I lived on the second floor... but it was two flights of stairs to get there...first door on the right at the top of the stairs.  The hallways were large like they led to ballrooms and the ceilings were lifted beyond any house built in my generation.

―Suzanne Ballantyne
 

What I have lost

My virginity
Lots of money
Friends
Family
My temper

With the exception of my virginity, I have found all of those things, as well.

—Ginger

Rivers I have known

 I grew up by the Hudson River, so the pathetic things they call rivers down here, I'd call them streams.  Maybe.  The Hudson River is wide and navigable, cuts deep into the hills, with real, significant budges and vistas — prime property.  The phobia, absolute phobia people in NY had about crossing the East and the Hudson to come to NJ, when we lived there, but we could be expected to come to them, no problem.  They SAID things like that, like, uh, we can't get there.  It's across the river, you know.  You'd think we were only asking them to swim!

— Geni

Memories of childhood/family

I am an only child living in a home with my mother and a man I thought was my father.  A man who got drunk and we would to run out of the house and hide.  After he left when I was about 8 years old, my mother had to go off to work and I spent days alone.  I remember eating at a neighbor's house everyday and they had butterbeans everyday.  We didn't have a car or very much money.  When I got older and had a child of my own, my mother told me the man I thought was my father, wasn't my father.  That my father was a doctor she had worked for.  I was able to meet him.  He was old and retired from his profession.  He was glad to see me, but didn't want his wife and other children to know who I was.  I didn't hold this affair against my mother because I knew the kind of man she was married to.  Both men eventually died. 

—Judy