We're in the Dog Days of Summer now and Writing Pad classes are hot! hot! hot! Get your pens wagging happily in one of our great new classes. Call 323-333-2954 or email marilyn@writingpad.com to enroll in our classes before they fill up!
Multi Week Classes
- So You Want To Be A Writer? (Tues. p.m.'s online, Wed. p.m.'s, Sat a.m.'s)
- Finishing School (Wed. p.m.'s, Sat a.m.'s)
- From Bedtime Stories To Tales of Teenage Woe: Writing for Kids and Young Adults (Sun. a.m.'s)
- You In 1200 Words: Writing and Publishing The Personal Essay (Mon. p.m.'s)
- It's All About You: A One-Person Show Workshop (Thurs. pm.'s)
- Etch a Sketch: A Webisode and Sketch Comedy Writing Workshop (Sun., Aug 21)
- You, In 1200 Words: Writing The Personal Essay (1 Day--Mon., Aug 22)
- Imagination Vacation: A Fiction Writing Workshop (Sun., Aug. 28)
- Short and Sweet: The Art of the Short Story (Wed., Aug. 31)
- Kick-Start Your Novel (Sun., Sept. 11)
Writing Prompt: What comes to mind when you think of the Dog Days? Is it the overwhelming, sticky heat or is it your canine, frolicking in the lake. Make a list of 5 things that pop into your head. Pick one and add a sensory detail to it (smell, taste, sound, touch). Then write a story, poem, or scene about that special occasion, including the sensory detail. Write for 10 minutes, then post your write in the comments of this blog!
For example, I'm going to write about one summer, when I lived in Chicago without AC. The heat was over 90 at midnight, with so much humidity that old folks were dying. What are you going to write about?
Comment on this blog! Write about your dog days? If you post your 10 minute write in the comments, you could win a free class!
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1 comment:
It’s hot, so very hot. Every window is open, but no air blows in, and we lay on the bed, the tilted bed, my mother and me, my father is on an old brown couch nearby. I say the bed is tilted, but really, I mean the room, the entire room that is also blue, and the entire house is that is also blue and that is also tilted. It is ninety years old, and it hasn’t been gutted yet - that will come next year when my father will return without us to renovate the house where he was a child and then to die soon after. I stretch my forearms away from my body to reach for another space of the sheet hoping for cooler texture, but I just get scratched – the sheets are stiff from being dried on the clothesline, and I miss dryer sheets and air conditioning and my bed and my window. The scratching helps actually, for I have thirty-nine mosquito bites, and they are swollen and itchy, and as much as I love the rooster crowing and the donkey’s call, I am thirteen and I wish I were home with my friends with clean skin in my clean house. The entire town is asleep, and I never knew entire towns could do that, just agree like that, to go to sleep because it is so hot and because babies need their rest. My mother is staring at the blue ceiling, my father, too, and I am thinking of cool ice cream and cool baths. She points to the molding with its squares like an unraveled checkerboard.
That’s beautiful, my mother says. Can we keep it?
Your grandfather, Katerina, carved those by hand, he says to me. Each square, by hand.
It’s so hot, my mother says.
Yes, it is, he says. Soon the air will blow in from Egypt. Soon it will cool down.
And it did cool down, eventually, and the old men and old women walking down the road woke us up with their laughter and shouts.
He didn’t keep the squares, and the next year when he gutted the house, we returned a to find new pine floors and pine ceiling and cool, white walls.
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Thanks for the prompt!
Kathy
www.plantthisgarden.com
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