Unexpected Intersections

 Hi everyone! After a whirlwind trip to the SCBWI Winter Conference , where I was inspired by our keynote speaker, Joseph Coelho , Children's Poet Laureate for the UK, I'm back home and diving deep into poetry again with this week's Story Cubes poem.  This poem is part of my ongoing challenge to myself to write to a prompt generated by  Story Cubes . I'm trying to reflect the order of the images on the cubes in the poem itself, and I'm challenging myself to write quickly: 20 minutes or less for each poem. This week's prompts left me feeling stymied for a while, but I let the images simmer for a while as I was cooking dinner and soon this poem emerged.     I Gave a Wave I waved to the waves And the waves waved back Then I waved goodbye But I’ll be back! © 2024, Elisabeth Norton What about you? What would you do with these as inspiration? I'd love to hear about it in the comments! Our generous host for Poetry Friday this week is Tabatha Yeatts over at The Oppo...

 Welcome to Poetry Friday! Our host this week is Mary Lee. She's shared a wonderful poem of her own, one by Sandra Cisneros, a video and more in her post. You can find all that poetic goodness and links to the other participating poets over here on her blog. My Story Cubes poetry prompt this week had me a little stumped at first. In addition to trying to write fast, I'm also challenging myself to keep the order of the dice in my poem. So if the cauldron comes first, I'm trying to make it first thing I mention. Either I like multi-dimensional chess, or I like making things challenging for myself. Or maybe both! Here are this week's prompts: And here is my poem. Plot Problems First I drew a cauldron Bubbling full of poisoned brew. Then I drew a hungry hero Now I don’t know what to do. hmmm . . . .  I know how to fix this! Draw one big foot, then two. Run fast, my big foot hero! Go find some barbecue. © 2025, Elisabeth Norton, all rights reserved What about you? Have you ...

 Happy Friday! Thank you for all the comments , well wishes (I'm feeling much better now, thank goodness!) and poems (it's so fun to see what other poets do with the same prompts!) in response to last week's post. Here are the Story Cubes prompts that I rolled for this week's poem: As part of this Story Cubes poem project, I'm not only challenging myself to write poems based on the dice prompts, but also to write the poems quickly. The goal is to jumpstart the creative process and not overthink my ideas. So, without further ado, here is my poem based on this prompt. Adventure Awaits There isn’t a hare. This isn’t a race. It’s true that we’re slow as a tortoise. But … We’re in agreement. We’ve chosen a path. In the landscape adventure awaits! We’ll set our own pace One step at a time. And the first step? We walk through the gate. © 2024, Elisabeth Norton What about you? What would you do with this inspiration? I'd love to read your poems based on this prompt i...

Two weeks into 2024, and I can say I've been sick for more than half of the year ... I hope your year is off to a healthier start! My 2023 was filled with lots of teaching and many writing deadlines, all of which left me no time for blogging about poetry and the writing life. But the good news is ... I have good news  about some of those writing projects that I should be able to share here in the months to come. As I come out of blogging hibernation, I was wondering how I wanted to approach my Poetry Friday posts this year. I love prompts, including Taylor Mali 's metaphor dice , and I was wondering how I could find some similar inspiration that was more kid-focused. That's when I remembered my Story Cubes !  These dice with images can be used to play games, or to roll up some inspiration on demand, and I've decided to use them as prompts for my Poetry Friday poems this year. So, without further ado, here is the first of my Story Cube poems, inspired by these dice: X Ma...