Just Ducky

a writing prompt for you

Welcome to Writing in Company.

This is a community for you, whatever your experience with writing. It’s an invitation to write about what matters—grief, gratitude, grace, and more.

When the world seems off kilter, as it does right now, using our words can help us stay centered. It can help us move through despair toward healing and wholeness as we remember, lament, wonder, and make meaning. Writing in company with others saved me once before. Let’s keep writing now, alone and together, and trust our words to help us say what matters.

With that hope, each week I share some of my words and a writing prompt, meant to be jumping-off points. Use the prompts however you like—to journal, to draft thoughts for your own writing project, as meditation or prayer ideas, or for another creative endeavor. You can always look back through the archive for more ideas. Grab your pen and paper, and let your words loose on the page.

I’m with some of my favorite people this week—faith formation leaders of the PC(USA) and other partner churches. Each year we gather to learn best practices to nurture faith in ourselves, our churches, and communities. And boy do we need each other and some inspiration this year. This is a pretty progressive bunch, even if our church members might not all be. The barrage of news about freezing humanitarian aid, deporting our neighbors, and demeaning our LGBTQ+ family hits hard. I’m grateful to have a community dedicated to creativity, resilience, and tenacity in the work of faith development, and friends with whom to laugh, cry, eat good food, and plot resistance. I can’t imagine how I would have done my work in churches all these years, or how I’d keep going now, without them.

This year, we are in Memphis at the historic Peabody Hotel, where ducks walk through the lobby on a red carpet, twice a day. Apparently they live on the roof of the building, and they come down the elevator with the Duckmaster in the morning, play all day in the lobby fountain, then walk the red carpet again in the early evening and head back to the roof.

There are ducks everywhere. Ducks embroidered on the pillows. Ducks made of soap in the bathroom. Chocolate ducks filled with mousse in the coffee shop. A gift shop with duck everything. There’s a huge blow-up rubber duck at registration, and duck stickers for our name tags. I’m here for it. (Even though my phone has autocorrected “ducks” to “sucks” at least three times in my text messages so far. I am not sure what that says about my text history, or perhaps this moment in history….)

I’m leading a workshop here called “Wrestling on the Page: Writing through Struggle as a Spiritual Practice." I’ll share a prompt from the workshop next week. In the meantime, I went looking for a duck prompt for you and found this, from the poet Billy Collins. In an article for Winter Park Magazine, he said:

I usually draw a blank whenever anyone asks me where I get my inspiration. But here, I find myself on safe ground. This poem came directly from the “duck/rabbit” drawing by Wittgenstein, the one he used to illustrate for his philosophy students the nature of puns and conundrums, where only one of two aspects can be apprehended at a time. You can see the duck, or you can see the rabbit, but not both simultaneously. My riff on the drawing turned out to be a sonnet, but not the love kind. Quite the opposite.

Wittgenstein’s duck/rabbit drawing

Here’s Billy Collins’ poem.

Duck/Rabbit

The lamb may lie down with the lion,
But they will never be as close as this pair
Who share the very lines
Of their existence, whose overlapping is their raison d’être.
How strange and symbolic the binds
That make one disappear
Whenever the other is spied.
Throw the duck a stare,
And the rabbit hops down his hole.
Give the rabbit the eye,
And the duck waddles off the folio.
Say, these could be our mascots, you and I —

I could look at you forever
And never see the two of us together.

—Billy Collins

a writing prompt

If you want you can get all philosophical like Wittgenstein, perhaps about the way we can’t see all of this moment in history, or all of America at one time. We look one direction and see one thing, then shift our gaze and see something else.

Or, just write about ducks. A saddish sonnet, or something silly. A memory or a story.

I’m starting with the memory of the duck pond in the middle of the mall near our house growing up. In those days our mom could leave us there while she went to Woolworth’s or Radio Shack without us. I saw Up with People sing near that duck pond. Much has changed since then, and not just the duck pond…

What will you write about?

Hang in there, friends.

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Photo by Ross Sokolovski on Unsplash