Bears and Bears and Bears, Oh My!
An Invitation to the Caravan Community Project with Your Variation on a Bear
How long does it take four writers to get through an agenda? Let’s just say there’s some wandering—say, along a path where we’re sharing bear stories, say, along an overgrown side trail where we’re like, What if we shared more widely? say, at a breathtaking vista where we think, What if we made this a community project?!
What we’re saying is we want YOUR variations on a bear.
What we’re saying is sometimes a prompt is the perfect way to send a once-stuck pen flying over the page.
Creating together can lead you to a pathway, to a piece you’d never have come to otherwise. Writing to and for each other can generate an energy everyone involved gets to draw from and build on. Sharing stitches together a beautiful whole.
What we’re saying is we want to write alongside you every Saturday.
We want take in all the magic that comes from a prompt, a comment, an idea, an insight, a conversation, a spark of connection—from the interconnectedness of writing in community. We want all the paths and trails and vistas that will emerge. Join us:
Bears and Bears and Bears, Oh My!
Here’s what’s coming from that impromptu prompt so far.
— In ’s “No One Ever Forgets a Bear,” the owner of a sleepy one-general-store approaches a door, axe in hand.
— remembers a man/bear duo and that even teddy bears have claws in “Four Bearing.”
— “Postcard from the Path” by opens with a busy rustling in high brush near a remote campsite.
— “One Woman’s Gaping Maw” by weaves together two bears, one on a mountain, one in a cage.
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— Holly contemplates the many meanings of bear in “The Art of Bearing What We Bare and Bear.”
And then
— bears up in a storm and breaks free of time in “Wild Encounter with the Sublime.”
— gets a sign and chases a “bear” named after a tortured glass sculptor with an eye patch in “Turkeys, Chow Chows and a Great Neighborhood Thaw.”
— In “grizzly” by , two stranded travelers are told to duck and meet a man with “just a little dark at the edge of his words.”
— In ’s “A Letter from Denali,” a mountain recalls the echo of laughter and wolf song and a small hand next to the fresh print of a large grizzly.
— ’s “The Bear” shares two women, one who sings a melancholic song to a voice in the woods and one with strength and grit.
— And “The Bear Story,” its companion piece, reminds us to “write for the people who don’t have a voice.”
— "Bear Sightings" by offers tales of more than one ursine encounter.
—In ’s "Bears Are Hard," read a story of an encounter that almost was.
Now Yours
Do you have a bear story to add to the collection? We’d love to read it!
Write it. Post it. Tag us (Caravan Writers Collective). We’ll include it in this list. And it may just be featured again during future editions of Caravan community writing projects.
Please restack this post to help us get more variations on a bear!
PS. Shout out to Tara Penry and her fantastic community writing projects, which no doubt helped inspire this project.
+ Get new prompts every Saturday
Novelist, memoirist, and poet
wrote in “The Side Door” about just how beautifully and deeply and unexpectedly a prompt can open us—lead us to doors we didn’t know were there or thought were closed.Come discover new doors with us!
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I can't decide if I'm more excited for the write-ins I'm hosting or the ones I'll be attending. Probably both equally!!
i absolutely love how you’re creating community through bear tales…but then again, i guess that’s what stories are all about 🩷