What to Do When Nothing is Normal

a writing prompt for you from poet Ellen Bass

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. Each week I share some 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.

Last week’s poem by Mark Nepo, and this week’s, by Ellen Bass, were introduced to me through a recent workshop led by poet Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, one of my writing inspirations, and the source of more of my prompts than anyone else. (I have sent her thanks and a little support, and will again…) In the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, I wasn’t able to attend the workshop, and I haven’t yet watched the replay, but these two poems were in the handout. They were just what I needed last week and this one, both of them pointing to grace in the midst of grief.

Grief is thick here in Western North Carolina. We are stunned by it, even those of us who knew personal grief already, and had some practice carrying it. This is different—the scale of it, and the way the stories keep coming, and the losses keep mounting, and we are all, all the time, in some mix of grief, and guilt about the weirdest things, and gratitude for many moments and helpers, and nothing is normal. Maybe it never will be. Maybe all grief is like that, and I had forgotten.

I am not a trauma expert, but I do know that the practice of mindfulness is one way to stay grounded when everything is overwhelming. Practicing being here. Right now. In our bodies. And noticing what we can see, hear, smell, taste, touch—this is how we (or at least I) get to the next moment, and the next. Ellen Bass—no stranger to grief— knows this. She shares it in her poem below.

Use Any Common Desolation as your prompt for today. Take a word, a phrase, an image, or whatever it brings up in you, and start writing about that. Stay with the details. Use your senses. Follow your thoughts on the page. Wherever they take you is worth visiting. You can read the poem or listen to the poet herself read it below.

a writing prompt from Ellen Bass

Any Common Desolation

can be enough to make you look up
at the yellowed leaves of the apple tree, the few
that survived the rains and frost, shot
with late afternoon sun. They glow a deep
orange-gold against a blue so sheer, a single bird
would rip it like silk. You may have to break
your heart, but it isn’t nothing
to know even one moment alive. The sound
of an oar in an oarlock or a ruminant
animal tearing grass. The smell of grated ginger.
The ruby neon of the liquor store sign.
Warm socks. You remember your mother,
her precision a ceremony, as she gathered
the white cotton, slipped it over your toes,
drew up the heel, turned the cuff;. A breath
can uncoil as you walk across your own muddy yard,
the big dipper pouring night down over you, and everything
you dread, all you can’t bear, dissolves
and, like a needle slipped into your vein—
that sudden rush of the world.

— by Ellen Bass from Indigo (Copper Canyon Press, 2020)

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