There’s a room in my house I like to call “my room,” a la Virginia Woolf’s essay, “A Room of One’s Own.” In truth the space also serves as a storage room for family art projects, files, junk mail waiting for the shredder, winter clothes and books that keep trickling into our house, as well as a guest bedroom for Grandma.

Today, thinking about writing prompts, I looked at the shelves where an odd array of novels and volumes of history lean haphazardly. My eyes trained on The Grapes of Wrath, a story that had me in tears when I first read it years ago. It’s a novel my son read last summer and one that’s also close to my husband’s heart. It’s part of my life’s mythology.

Here’s the prompt I came up with:

• Choose a book that calls to you.
• Go to the end of several chapters, and find the final noun or verb.
• Make a list of 10 or so words, and then write a 10- to 20-line poem using those words.
• Maybe the feeling or tone of your poem will come from your emotional connection to the book you choose. Maybe not.

And, if you’d like to collaborate on this prompt:

• Find your book and look for five words.
• Ask a friend to look through the same book and find five more words.
• Each of you writes five or so lines.
• Now combine the lines, alternating between yours and your friend’s lines.

For my poem, I worked solo. I found 11 nouns, and I ended up writing a free verse poem about laborers living in Mexico. The theme of my poem is the misery of poverty and the callousness of the ruling class, a definite connection to Steinbeck.

Here are Steinbeck’s words incorporated into my poem: men, truck, dust, buildings, hunters, head, jail, cars, west, windows.

Happy word hunting!
~Christine.