Where I live in Loudoun County, the snow is falling thickly. According to the forecast, we are supposed to get up to 10 inches, which is a whopper of a storm for us in northern Virginia. So, for those who are able to stay home and receive this day as a gift of found time, I offer these 10 ideas for things to do on a snow day (the writer’s version): 1. Sit in bed with a cup of hot tea or coffee and peruse that book on writing you’ve been meaning to finish (in my case, Elizabet

In the last six-week session of Writing from the Heart, one of our favorite prompts was this: Write about your favorite childhood junk food, perhaps in the form of an ode. An ode is a lyric poem that praises its subject, one of the classics being Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn." However, there are also odes on more prosaic topics, such as socks (Pablo Neruda), chocolate (Barbara Crooker), and okra (Kevin Young). As you know if you’ve taken a workshop with me or another Amherst

A lot of people are frightened by the very idea of writing a poem, and who can blame them? Visions of high school English papers dripping with red ink--or, in my case, a painfully earnest imitation of Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet--swim into view. We don't want to make fools of ourselves, and attempting to write poetry seems like the surest route to perdition. However, in the Amherst Writers & Artists method, we believe poetry can be fun! Because no one will EVER say a critical

Every now and then I find a writing prompt that is so much fun it requires wider sharing. Mood Ring, from Writing from the Senses: 59 Exercises to Ignite Your Creativity and Revitalize Your Writing by Laura Deutsch, is just such a prompt. In this exercise you will use similes to create a poem based on an emotion. This is the template for your poem: Mood Ring Poem Pick an emotion—joy, anger, frustration, sadness, etc.—and complete your own poem. When I feel [name emotion] ____

Last Monday afternoon was the first meeting in 2016 of “Writing from the Heart,” a women’s AWA workshop in Purcellville. I like to start a new session with a “getting to know you” exercise. Sometimes it’s a verbal sharing of what we’re working on or what we like to write, and sometimes it’s a short piece of writing about ourselves. On Monday, I asked everyone to write for 5 minutes in response to this prompt (why don’t you try it, too?) “If I could write anything, it would be