Writing Classes

Last week I attended the second of the poetry and flash fiction Leisure Learning classes at McNeese. At the Tuesday night poetry class Connie had us free write from memory about a time we got away with something. I remembered the swimming lessons at the lake on Shell Beach Drive when I was about five. The instructor told us we'd be going under the water the next week and get a shell from the bottom and show it to the class when we came up. I stewed about it all week. Even offered to stay home and pick the strawberries. If anyone has ever picked strawberries they know how desperate I was. It's not that I was afraid of the water. Just didn't like going under at that time in my life. Five years old, for crying out loud. At any rate, I got my shell and showed it to the class. But - I didn't go all the way to the bottom for it. And that's all I'm saying about that. After I read it out loud for the class, Connie said it worked great as a flash fiction piece, so I'll use it in that class for this week's assignment.

Next we did some poem sketching from Sandford Lyne's excellent book, Writing Poetry from the Inside Out. From several groups of four words each I chose one with the following words: icicles, poor, roof, beauty. I ended up with a haiku. Here's my attempt.

Icicles melt the
beauty of the roof into
a pudgy puddle.

For the non-poets among us, a haiku is a Japanese form with three lines and a syllable count of 5-7-5.

For the FLEX YOUR MUSCLES writing prompt see what you can do with those four words. Maybe you can get a longer poem or even a story out of them.