🚨Community prompt alert! 🚨

AND - save the date for our first community reading!

It’s here!

Our next Caravan Community Writing Prompt has arrived, and we can’t wait to read what it inspires in you.

But before we send you scurrying off to your desks with the prompt…

SAVE THE DATE!

Come celebrate the opening of the next session of the Caravan courses, Craft Campfires, and community events with us.

What: The Inaugural Caravan Community Reading

When: Saturday, September 6

10:45 a.m. PT/1:45 p.m. ET

Where: Same Zoom room as the Write-In: [link].

No charge - no prereqs - no experience necessary - no reading required!

The reading will immediately follow the Weekly Write-In. We’ll give everybody a chance to stretch, refill their coffee cup, walk their creatures, and reconvene; we’ll be joined by folks who are attending for the reading only, and off we’ll go.

The Caravan instructors will lead off with readings from work we’ve started in the Caravan Community - whether in response to a Community Prompt, something we wrote during a Write-In, or works we’ve had a chance to develop by taking each other's courses - and then we’ll turn it over to the larger Caravan Crew for an open mic.

The Open Mic sign up will be posted two days before the reading (subscribers, you’ll get an email just like this), on Thursday, September 4.

We want you here ⬆️ !!

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Not sure what you might want to read?

Well, here comes the Community Prompt.

Sometimes we like our prompts big and sprawling - our Summer Playlist prompt cast a wide net - and sometimes we like ’em short and a little bit weird, like Marya the Bear and Bears and Bears, Oh My! prompt that kicked off this series in May.

Sometimes, though, a seemingly straightforward prompt can take us to places we’d long since forgotten or never even imagined, tug our minds in new directions, spark questions we didn’t know we wanted to ask, dust off an old photo filed away in our minds, open onto an unknown world hidden behind the coats in a wardrobe, carry us down an unfamiliar road - or send us digging through a box labeled Lost + Found.

That’s it - that’s the prompt. Lost and Found.

We’ve all lost and found more than a few things in our lives. Write about one or the other or both - or, as we like to say at Caravan, go rogue.

Need inspiration? When in doubt, read poems. Here - a few stanzas from Elizabeth Bishop’s brilliant sestina “One Art”:

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

And one from Dg Nanouk Okpik’s poem “Found”:

Taken:

“duck foot skin;
an owl with five owlets;
nesting minks;
caught in a fish trap.
A bird egg found in winter.”

You’ll have to read the rest of Bishop’s to find out what she’s really lost, and the rest of Okpik’s to find out what is “given” and what might be “found.”

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The first two community prompts have prompted you to share such a wealth of wonderful writing - as have our courses, workshops, and the weekly Write-Ins! - that we’ve created …

A Caravan Community Writing Round-Up

Here’s a quick highlight reel of some incredible writing that found its spark somewhere in the Caravan rooms and was stoked and tended by the wonderful writers who make up the larger writing community. (Did we miss yours? Let us know! And don’t forget to tag us in future posts so we can share!)

From our first Community Prompt, ‘Bear and Bears and Bears, Oh My!’:

No One Ever Forgets a Bear, by Matt Smythe

Four Bearing, by Paul Corman-Roberts,

Postcard from the Path, by Marya Hornbacher

One Woman’s Gaping Maw and The Art of Bearing What We Bare and Bear, by Holly Starley

Wild Encounter with the Sublime, by Julie Gabrielli

Turkeys, Chow Chows and a Great Neighborhood Thaw, by Kate Sonnick

Grizzly, by Rebecca Hooper

A Letter from Denali, by Kendall Lamb

The Bear, by Paul Crenshaw (and don’t miss its companion piece, The Bear Story)

Bear Sightings, by Leah Wolfe

Bears Are Hard, by Toni Jeffrey

Just Bearly Light Enough, by Janice Anne Wheeler

Check out all these happy faces diving into craft!

From our second prompt, the Summer Playlist:

The Necessity of Cut Grass, by Matt Smythe

Snapshots, Soundtrack, by Marya Hornbacher

The Pepsi Challenge, by Paul Corman-Roberts

Kaleidoscope to a Road, by Holly Starley

July Meant Freedom, nothing to prove, no one to please, by Teyani Whitman

Returning Home to Cabbagetown, by Duwan Dunn

Roll Em Down, by Cliff Watson

A Prelude to Winter, by Evelyn Fox

Holy smokes, do we ♥️ writing with you!

From Courses, Workshops, and Weekly Write-Ins:

“ICYMI: Dead Presidents (Except for Five) by Toni Jeffrey

This gorgeous note by Julie Gabrielli

Sticky Candy: getting unstuck from unsubstantiated emptiness by Kris Onyx

Dear Leah, weeds are ruining my marriage by Archetypal Herbalism

Beauty Wins: I’m trying to tell you what I’ve heard by Elizabeth Beggins

We Are a Many-Feathered Creature by Holly Starley

THINKING OF RASPBERRY KOOL-AID: A story of makeshift bike ramps and safety-second in the '70s by Matt Smythe

Gangs of Bay Station Island by Paul Corman-Roberts

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Save the date: Caravan Community Reading, September 6!

and start your engines…

Your next Community Prompt is

…Lost + Found.

We can’t wait to read where this takes you!

Become a Caravan member & create with us. 🪄

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Become a founding member & enjoy all that + a year of craft campfire salons. 🔥