Metaphortography Prompts are free visual and verbal writing prompts for inspiration and reflection. This is the Monday section of Aimee Liu’s MFA Lore. Our Wednesday sections are Well Published, Live! videos and Writer In The World, a curated collection of essays on the writing life by acclaimed MFA faculty and alumni. MFA Core essays on the craft and business of creative writing drop each Saturday. Receive all these benefits, plus our bimonthly Zoom salons, for 30% off your annual subscription if you subscribe now:

Anniversary Special, 30% off!

STAGED

It’s all too perfect, that eloquent, beautifying spotlight, the rearguard poised to prop or defend, the surround-sound of understudies and acolytes, rivals and sycophants, aide-de-camps and apparatchiks, oh! and always out there burbling, swaying in the blue night the audience, oh the audience breathless to cheer or jeer you off and out into the wings, the wings where you will soon enough, inevitably enough, fly away at once ejected and freed.

STAGED

1: produced on a stage

2: arranged for public view or public effect

3: decorated in order to enhance appeal to an audience

4: faked

Here is your writing prompt:

As you contemplate the image above, remember and write out a moment when you/your character felt “staged” by circumstances that placed you on a pedestal, mound, podium, or set where all eyes fell on you, making you the glorified center of attention and expectation, whether or not you felt ready to meet the moment.

Consider:

• What you’d done—or failed to do— to get to this moment

• What was done to, for, or around you to place you on this stage—and why

• How the stage or context was prepared, the ground laid for someone like you to claim this particular spotlight

• Who was in the audience, with what expectations

• How the attention made you feel

• Who was waiting in the wings or offstage, and how they acted when you were done

• How your feelings unfurled as the scene played out and ended

• What happened when you were no longer onstage

• What you learned about yourself

• What you learned about those who’d placed you there

• What your experience said or revealed about the world that selected you for that stage

Loreates’ Corner

This week I want to reintroduce you to a few of the wonderful stacks by authors who’ve appeared on Well Published, Live! with me. Most of these stacks have ignited since our conversations, so you might have missed them. I invite you now to take a look, read, subscribe, and share!

Min writes Shanghai Baby:

Shanghai Baby

On writing books, running a lit mag, & raising 2 babies in Shanghai

By Juli

writes :

Short Story Short

Monthly story recommendations from Rachel Khong

By Rachel Khong

write :

Christina on the Margins

Join my free newsletter for brief, occasional updates - insights, inspiration, and just enough news to keep you in the know

By Christina Baker Kline

writes :

writes :

Bookish

Books & book-adjacent topics, taking the long view, the writing life, and related resources. Posts every 5-6 days.

By Christine Sneed

writes :

Lauren’s Substack

All things fiction writing, publishing, and following your creative journey.

By Lauren Ling Brown

writes :

Jenna Blum

DENSHOSHA 伝承者 (den sho sha): sha means "person". 伝承 means keeping knowledge through generations. /As a Holocaust survivor interviewer & author of WW2 books, it's my honor to be DENSHOSHA for survivors, who asked me to stand against fascism & call it out.

PS: If you’re an MFA Lore subscriber with a great writing stack that I haven’t mentioned, please drop the link in a comment, so I can add you to our Corner.

Leave a comment

TENDERNESS

Touch, all skin and sensation, sublime attention, like light spilling, tracing, igniting our most deeply hidden secrets. With you, there was always that dueling pull of care and caution, so easily mistaken for reluctance, those sweet yet maddening hesitations, palms poised as if to strike but stilled to the verge of anguish before gliding to their destinations, finding purchase in the nape of a neck or the fold of a knee, the softer valleys and runged ladders of our mutual landscape. So familiar, those gentle motions, like the silk of water streaming between thirsty lips—eloquent, necessary, fleeting. What do they mean? Can they be trusted? Do I detect danger in this beautiful seduction? Such fierce attraction to the doomed enterprise of becoming one.

TENDERNESS: a tender quality or condition

a: gentleness and affection

b: the quality of being succulent and easily chewed

c: sensitivity to touch or palpation

Here is your writing prompt:

Try a Little Tenderness

Read more

Read more

HELD

Hers is the voice in my head, the sound in the night, the arms forever reaching, pushing, encircling. What? Me? My life? My choices?

More. My very being. My coming and going, both. She bore me. Carried and contained me, never let me go. The cursed elastic never stretched far enough, the blessed bond never broke. Our ages bled into and through each other, radiant with the heat of devotion, the impossible light of longing, the incandescent rage of possession. Ours was a covenant of frustration. We were each other’s but not each other. Connected but not the same.

I thought it would be ever thus, my mother and myself. It is, now that she’s gone. And it never was.

HELD: Old English healdan "to hold, own"

1. a: Controlled

   b: Kept in one's possession

   c: Possessed by right

2. a: Kept or restricted by force

   b: Restrained or kept back

   c: Delayed

3. Embraced

4. a: Supported

   b: Carried or cradled

   c: Protected

   d: Secured

5. Lasted without breaking

6. Contained

7. Judged or asserted

8. Convened

Here is your writing prompt:

As you contemplate the image above, consider what it meant to be held by your mother when you were younger. Ask yourself:

• How did you respond to her embrace, and why?

• Who supported whom?

• What did you need from each other?

• What did you take from each other?

• What did you freely give to each other?

• What could you never get from each other?

• What did you love most— and least— about your mother’s touch?

• What would you do differently now, if you could go back to her in time?

Now write that do-over scene with your mother. Tell her something that you always needed to say but didn’t. Confront the misunderstandings or secrets between you. Exchange confidences and ask the questions you were always too embarrassed or afraid to ask. Test the boundaries. See if you can find a new, closer way to hold each other, if only on the page. Or, if that’s not possible, see if you can find a new way to react and hold the truth of your embrace.

P.S. For more inspiration, read ’s gorgeous essay on being Held, which shared with me after reading my prompt!

Loreates’ Corner

I’m delighted to introduce you to a few of the wonderful stacks by writers in our community. Please read, subscribe, and share! And if you’re an MFA Lore subscriber with a great writing stack that I haven’t mentioned, please drop the link in a comment, so I can add you to our Corner.

writes

Publishing Confidential

News and analysis about the book publishing industry that you won't read anywhere else.

By Kathleen Schmidt

writes

Rebounding

Essays about artists and other adults I admire. But also poems, recommendations, and serializing a memoir I'm writing called "Happiness Ruined Everything," chapters of which I'll post probably once a week. Oh, and I don't believe in trigger warnings.

By Michael Klein

Save the Dates!

Tuesday, May 12, at noon PT

Well Published, Live! with Karen Shepard on her Paris Review publication and writing about mixed-race families

I’m delighted to invite you to my next Well Published, Live! with novelist and essayist Karen Shepard. We’ll be chatting about her latest publication — an epistolary essay about mothers!—in The Paris Review and about the challenge of writing mixed-race stories.

Reserve May 12

---

Saturday, May 23 at 9am PT

Take 5 Writing Workshop

This monthly workshop for Premium MFA Lore Subscribers allows us to take a close look at a different 5-page submission each month, tailoring feedback to the needs of each writer. To join, become a Premium Subscriber today:

Take 5 Program

---

Saturday, June 13 at 10am PT

Loreate Salon for Paid Subscribers

All paid subscribers are welcome as we discuss the thorny issues bedeviling our collective writing life.

Please RSVP in the chat, and include any topics you’d like us to discuss:

Read more

Read more

Against the surface, time blurs like an echo, shadow of mind.

Read more

Read more

Read more

Read more

Read more

Read more

Read more

Hello Loreates,

I suspect you’re struggling with the same rage-grief-shock-horror whiplash that I am after this weekend’s murder of another innocent protester in Minneapolis. I’m haunted, too, by my mother’s warnings, issued when Trump was first threatening to run for president, when we in the younger generations accused her of Chicken Littling, when she told us she’d grown up among fascists and Nazis and KKK in Milwaukee in the 1920s, when she insisted they were all still here across the USA and Trump was just their type and not to be dismissed.

We didn’t listen. We rarely listened. We always thought we knew better. She was overly dramatic, had too much time on her hands, and was nearly 100 years old. What could she possibly understand about the 21st century? Far more than we did, as it turned out.

My mother died four years ago today, at the age of 101. Our relation…

Read more

Read more

Read more

Read more

Read more

Read more

Read more