This week’s collaborative read write prompt is brought to you by Read Write Poem participant Holly, from Lost Kite. Thank you, Holly, for the prompt! If anyone else has prompt ideas, we’d love for you to share them. Simply email us at prompt (at) readwritepoem (dot) org.

I have been teaching the book Steppenwolf , by Herman Hesse, to my freshman students at Gainesville State College. This is a book that has influenced my thinking in many ways, and I never get tired of reading it. In the book, the main character, Harry, has a dualistic nature (man and wolf). He struggles with who he really is (or even wants to be), as though he has to be just one thing or another. Is he bourgeois? Is he an intellectual? Is he animalistic? We all have this struggle on some level-to figure stuff out, to “find ourselves.”

Another character, Hermine (who becomes Herman at one point in the book), is comfortable with the many sides of herself — intellectual, playful, shallow, deep, feminine, masculine, mother and daughter. She doesn’t necessarily think these parts of us have to conflict.

Hermine proposes that it is human for us to all have layers, like an onion — not just devil and angel, or masculine and feminine, or human and animal — but many, many souls inside of us. When we are peeled (or choose to peel ourselves), we reveal a new layer. We keep revealing layers throughout our lives.

Let’s get comfortable with our many layers by imagining ourselves as onions! (I wanna be a Vidalia myself. I’d better put on my contacts. I can’t peel an onion with bare eyes … ooo, I’ll cry.) Whatever type of onion you are, you have layers. Are you a student, parent, lover, child, poet, intellectual, activist? Are you shy, outgoing, self-conscious, alert, oblivious? Heroic, fearful, uncertain, confused?

Do you have other layers that define you? Of course you do. We could never begin to list them all.

Here’s how we’re going to do it, and how we’re going to make it collaborative:

1. We each write a stanza (or stanzas if you want to write from more than one layer) the represents a layer of yourself. Don’t get too hung up on making something “perfect.” We are all just supplying raw material here.
2. We leave those stanzas in the comments of this post. Posting will close at midnight Sunday (Central Standard Time).
3. We are all invited to work with any or all of the stanzas left in the comments and do whatever we want with them in terms of revision. The sky’s the limit in terms of how we recast the pieces to create something new. Use all. Use some. Break stanzas apart and reconnect them with other stanzas. Change the order. Augment. Reduce. However you want to approach it is up to you.
4. We all come back for the Get Your Poem On post Thursday and link to the revised work. Then the merriment ensues as we see how other people have handled and shaped the raw material.

Sound good? Good. Let’s all peel away.

Note: In case it’s not super clear, the topic we are writing about is not onions. The onion is the metaphor for how we are talking about the layers of self and writing from those layers. We are writing about ourselves.