#writingprompts

Lisa Colburn

Mar 28, 2019
1 min

Writer Showcase: Barbara Leary

It's been far too long since I've showcased one of the talented writers in my Monday afternoon women's writing workshop, "Writing from the Heart." Barbara Leary's work schedule doesn't often permit her to join us, but I love it when she does! Barbara says she'll write just about anything if you give her a prompt, but she mostly sticks to creative nonfiction and children's stories. You can follow her on @CoquinaKids (Facebook and Twitter) to see works in progress. Barbara wrot

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Lisa Colburn

Feb 20, 2019
3 min

10 Things To Do on a Snow Day

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

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Lisa Colburn

Jun 19, 2018
3 min

Try This: Small Stones

At the end of April a small group of writers joined me for Flower & Garden / Pen & Page, a Saturday morning writing workshop that incorporated a visit to the annual Leesburg Flower & Garden Festival within walking distance of my house. As part of our writing that day, I asked participants to enter the festival with the intention of gathering small stones. Small stones are present-moment sense impressions that invite us into deep noticing. They require us to fully pay attentio

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Lisa Colburn

May 18, 2018
4 min

Try This: Ode to Childhood Junk Food

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

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Lisa Colburn

Feb 9, 2018
2 min

Markets: How to Submit to Visual Verse

Sometimes as writers we just need a quick fix—to be noticed, to have our work read by someone other than our spouse, and to see our words in print (or online). If you find yourself in need of some quick validation, submitting a short piece to Visual Verse may be just the ticket! Visual Verse is an online anthology of art, poetry, fiction, and nonfiction—anything goes, in other words. On the first of every month, Visual Verse posts a new image and requests submissions for its

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Lisa Colburn

Nov 1, 2017
1 min

Writer Showcase: Holly Peterson

A new session of Writing from the Heart, a women’s Amherst Writers & Artists workshop, began on Monday. I had been looking forward to this particular workshop because I had been holding in reserve some spooky postcards I had bought at La Chartreuse, a 14th century monastery in Villeneuve lez Avignon. I couldn’t wait to see how people would use them in their writing. While I very much enjoyed everyone’s pieces, Holly Peterson’s seemed to especially capture the mood of the imag

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Lisa Colburn

Jul 17, 2017
3 min

Living the Dream

Last Wednesday night I manifested a dream. For years, ever since I became a writing workshop leader, I have felt called to offer a class for stepmoms that would teach them what I have learned through experience: that keeping a journal is an invaluable tool for weathering the often stormy seas of stepmothering. In the service of this dream I became a certified Journal to the Self® facilitator and took various classes through the Therapeutic Writing Institute. I took a curricul

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Lisa Colburn

Jun 22, 2017
1 min

Try This: Fun with Postcards

I’ve recently returned from a weeklong writing retreat in the south of France (more on that in a future post) led by my friend and fellow Amherst Writers & Artists facilitator Summer Hardinge. Yesterday I was looking through the notebook I kept while there, and I noticed a short piece that I wrote in response to a postcard. Summer had a collection of Van Gogh postcards, and each day on the retreat she invited one of the participants to draw one. She would then post it on the

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Lisa Colburn

Mar 16, 2017
3 min

Writer Showcase: Cindy Atlee

Cindy Atlee and I go way back to the days when I taught YogaRhythmics®. Every week we danced, laughed, and stretched together, and I had no idea that she was also a powerhouse in the marketing world. Back then she was Senior Vice President/Branding & Organizational Culture at the global public relations firm Porter Novelli. These days she is principal of The Storybranding Group, a consulting firm that helps clients define and give voice to what’s best and most distinctive abo

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Lisa Colburn

Aug 26, 2016
2 min

The Words That Stayed With Me

As I was organizing my office this week to prepare for the new workshop season, I came across a little spiral notebook full of gems. In any AWA workshop, the practice is to write together in response to a particular prompt, read our work aloud if we wish, and then respond to each writer with positive feedback. I like to keep a little notebook to jot down the words or phrases I especially like as each writer reads her (or his) work aloud, and it was this notebook I found in my

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Lisa Colburn

Jul 31, 2016
2 min

Writer Showcase: Holly Peterson

Holly Peterson has been coming to my "Writing from the Heart" workshop in Purcellville for several years now. An accomplished artist and co-owner of an art studio in Leesburg, her writing is suffused with wit and wisdom--and there is often an unexpected twist that gives the reader something to think about. Here are a few short pieces that she wrote in the workshop. Bon appetít! A Sandwich for Lunch Prompt: a photograph of a sandwich on a plate Crispy baguette, greens, parsley

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Lisa Colburn

Jul 27, 2016
2 min

Try This: The List Poem

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

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Lisa Colburn

Jul 8, 2016
3 min

Writing the Broken World

This morning when I read the news I was overwhelmed with rage and sorrow. Two more black men—Alton Sterling and Philando Castile—killed by police over minor infractions in the past few days. Five police officers killed by snipers in Dallas at a #BlackLivesMatter protest. Senseless, stupid, bigotry; lethal violence. The worst aspects of our humanity on flagrant display. I wept over it all. I joined Campaign Zero. And then, as writers do, I pulled out my journal. Into its pages

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Lisa Colburn

Apr 27, 2016
4 min

Writer Showcase: Laura Stapleton

I met Laura Stapleton in my "Jump Start Your Writing" workshop through the Loudoun County Public Schools Adult Education program. As you will see, Laura is an accomplished writer, and she wowed everyone in the workshop with her response to this prompt from The First Line, a quarterly online magazine. I am thrilled to share it with you here. Laura is a graduate of Virginia Tech, a former editor for Log Home Living magazine, and a freelance writer whose work has appeared in loc

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Lisa Colburn

Apr 7, 2016
2 min

Try This: Mood Ring Poem

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] ____

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Lisa Colburn

Mar 21, 2016
3 min

Writer Showcase: Summer Hardinge

This week I have the pleasure of showing off TWO talented friends and writers. Singer/songwriter Roger Tomhave cowrote a wonderful song called "Homemade and Handed Down," which appears on his latest CD by that name. He also created this video, which I used as a writing prompt in my Monday women's writing workshop a few months ago. The song stirred up some beautiful stories, including the piece below by Summer Hardinge. Summer says she has always loved words and stories, wheth

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Lisa Colburn

Mar 15, 2016
2 min

Try This: The Proust Questionnaire

As I was scrolling through my iPhone news feed last week I stumbled across this article: "Sally Field Answers Vanity Fair's Proust Questionnaire." I was intrigued. I hadn't heard of this questionnaire before, and I wanted to learn more. Because I so often think in terms of writing prompts (I can't seem to turn it off), I thought it would be a great find for my workshops. It also tweaked my literary curiosity. Yesterday my afternoon AWA women's writing group worked with the f

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Lisa Colburn

Feb 29, 2016
2 min

Lessons in a Roof Leak

There’s nothing like a roof leak to show you where the cracks are—in your home and in your life. On a Monday morning a few weeks ago, we discovered water pouring down our family room walls. There had been a big storm the night before, and it was still raining. We rushed to put out buckets and towels, but the damage had already been done. So for the past few weeks I have been dealing with water and mold (yes, mold can form that quickly) remediation, insurance, roofing, and the

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Lisa Colburn

Feb 15, 2016
2 min

Writer Showcase: Barb Galvin

I enjoy everyone who comes to my writing workshops—after all, they are my tribe! But I must confess a particular fondness for people who come to the workshop harboring doubts as to whether they belong and then discovering within themselves a blazing passion for writing. Barb Galvin is just such a person. Like it was yesterday, I remember when she introduced herself in the first meeting of one of my “Jump Start Your Writing” workshops through the Loudoun County adult education

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A Few Words on My Favorite Topic (Books)

Lisa Colburn

Jan 22, 2016
1 min

A Few Words on My Favorite Topic (Books)

Like most writers, I am a bibliophile. I don’t say this lightly: every room in my house, including bathrooms, has books piled and waiting. I even wrote an article about my “book habit” years ago for the Washington Post! I am currently visiting family in Maine (fortuitous timing, as Winter Storm Jonas bears down on my home turf), and yesterday I decided to go to the local Barnes & Noble to pick up Elizabeth Gilbert’s latest book on creativity, Big Magic. And because my husband

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