Remember, Rejoice, Resist

a writing prompt for you + an Alison Luterman poem

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. In an off-kilter world, using our words can help us stay centered and move toward healing and wholeness. Writing in company with others saved me once. Let’s keep writing now, alone and together, and trust our words to help us see and say what matters.

As I write this, the senior dog we rescued 5 years ago today is snoring nearby. She’s had another difficult afternoon of napping, broken up by a package delivery, a little thunder, and a friend stopping by. Twyla was a pandemic rescue. Our daughter came home from college and immediately started scrolling the local dog foster posts, and we would have done most anything legal to ease that transition for her, and for us all. “You caved really quickly,” she noted this week. Yes, yes we did.

Twyla is a good dog. She doesn’t bark. She isn’t aggressive. She is an anxious weirdo about ceiling fans and nail trims, but we all have our quirks. She has chewed up a few items, most memorably a brand new study Bible, one of my journals, and a cardboard box with two packages of miso ramen soup mix inside it, but she is still a good dog.

I just searched to see if I have mentioned her ceiling fan phobia before, and I discovered I wrote about her eating my journal exactly a year ago, on her fourth “gotcha day.” I am one of those dog people, now.

When dogs and poetry overlap, it’s good. Even (especially?) in a crisis of democracy, dogs + poetry = good.

a writing prompt

During April, National Poetry Month, I’ve been sharing poems as writing prompts as a way to help us navigate difficult days. The one I chose for today was circulated on social media several weeks ago. I first read it on a post that Laura Davis shared. I recommend Laura’s newsletter The Writer’s Journey for generative writing prompts and posts about how writing can help us all be more resilient, courageous, and joyful.

Read the poem by Alison Luterman below. Notice a word, a phrase, an image, or an idea that speaks to you, and start writing there. Write without stopping to plan or edit. Follow your thoughts on the page, and see what your own words have to tell you. You have wisdom inside you—let it bubble up on to the page.

At Albany Bulb with Elaine 
—by Alison Luterman 
 
Side by side on a log by the bay. 
Sunlight. Unleashed dogs, 
prancing through surf, almost exploding 
out of their skins with perfect happiness. 
Dogs who don't know about fired park rangers, 
or canceled health research, or tariff wars, 
or the suicide hotline for veterans getting defunded, 
or or or. We've listed horror upon horror 
to each other for weeks now, and it does no good, 
so instead I tell her how I held a two-day old baby 
in my arms, inhaling him like a fresh-baked loaf of bread, 
then watched as a sneeze erupted through his body 
like a tiny volcano. It was the look of pure 
astonishment on his face, as if he were Adam 
in the garden of Eden making his debut achoo, 
as if it were the first sneeze that ever blew, 
that got me. She tells me how her dog 
once farted so loudly he startled himself 
and fell off the bed where he'd been lolling, 
and then the two of us start to laugh so hard 
we almost fall off our own log. And this 
is our resistance for today; remembering 
original innocence. And they can't 
take it away from us, though they ban 
our very existence, though they slash 
our rights to ribbons, we will have 
our mirth and our birthright gladness. 
Long after every unsold Tesla 
has vaporized, and earth has closed over 
even the names of these temporary tyrants, 
somewhere some women like us 
will be sitting side by side, facing the water, 
telling human stories and laughing still. 

You can find more from Alison Luterman here.

a little context

I got curious about the poem’s title, and looked up Albany Bulb. Learning even a little about the context added to my read of the poem. If you know more about it, please share in the comments.

The Bulb is a former construction landfill site in the San Francisco Bay Area. For a time, it was home to an eclectic unhoused community, and a messy flourishing site of protests, performances, and funky urban art made from driftwood and debris. It is now a public park owned by the city of Albany, California. The people living there were forced to leave. Much of the art remains, for now. A non-profit organization called Love the Bulb works to celebrate and protect the area's history, artistic culture, and environmental interests.

Like our nation, the Albany Bulb has a complex history, with competing and clashing worldviews, and the story/history isn’t over yet. Still, friends can gather there on a bench and remember, rejoice, and in that way, resist. Small moments like those are what can fuel us for the long haul.

What moments like that will you write about today?

like/comment/share

Join in the conversation with others in the comments. Tell me what you think about the prompt, or where your writing takes you.

Know someone who might enjoy this prompt or others? Please share!

Each week I share some ideas and a writing prompt, meant to be jumping-off points. Use the prompts however you like—to journal, to draft a writing project, as prayer ideas, or for another creative endeavor. If this one doesn’t resonate, look back through the archive for more. Clicking the heart to like this post helps keep my writing prompts visible and my own writer’s heart grateful.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash