Writing Prompt: INTERIOR
Visual inspiration + mental exercise to start your writing week
So deep. I could see miles down there, all those roads and rivers inside myself. How unreachable I was! Where on earth did they all lead?
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 section is Writer In The World, a curated collection of essays on the writing life by acclaimed MFA faculty and alumni. Well Published videos and other MFA Core essays on the craft and business of creative writing will drop each Saturday. Receive some or all of these newsletters by subscribing now:
INTERIOR
I never knew my palm could yawn so deep.
“Don’t look,” he says, so much older, frightened of more than I can see. On a bench we sit in the restaurant he owns, First Avenue at 1am throbbing with my pulse, outside.
A neat slice of skin curls up like a tent flap exposing other worlds inside. Layers of oozing color, shape, and boundless space. Infinity in inches.
“You’re in shock,” he says, my lover, my boss, my unraveling indiscretion.
Through. It’s as if I can see through myself, the attraction away from him and his instructions, magnetic. I look and look.
Anemones, I’d been carrying, to chill overnight. Purple and pink as bruises with bright sparks of gold, each ornamental stem in its own glass vase, each vase a perfect round blade on a tray. One false step, and the whole arrangement came crashing down, weaponized in an instant.
Rolled -up kitchen mat, tray in the air, glass on the floor, palm on the glass, and me on the palm. Flowers must have been everywhere.
So deep. I can see miles down there, all those roads and rivers inside myself. How unreachable I am! Where on earth do they all lead?
“Put your head down.” His palm imprints my back. His hand tourniquets my wrist. Two weeks earlier, my face in his lap as he drove the Cross Island Expressway to the disco he’d just bought. “You’re losing too much blood.” And then, “The cab’s here. Come. Lean on me.”
In the emergency room, he waits beside me for the surgeon to be roused from bed. Beside us an ancient couple in blood, a botched double suicide at ninety.
I’ve just turned twenty-two. The surgery takes six hours. My parents arrive the next morning. Four weeks later the surgeon, after checking my wound, will press me against the locked door of his office, swearing he’s never done this before. I won’t ever see him or wait tables again. But I’ll let my parents go to their graves singing the praises of the two men who saved my hand.
INTERIOR: From Latin, *interus inward, on the inside
: lying, occurring, or functioning within the limiting boundaries : inner
: belonging to mental or spiritual life
: belonging to the inner constitution or concealed nature of something
: lying away or remote from the border or shore
: the inner or spiritual nature : character
: the interior part (as of a country or island)
: the internal or inner part of a thing : inside
: the internal affairs of a state or nation
: a representation (as in a play or movie) of the interior of a building
Here is your writing prompt:
As you contemplate the image above, travel inside a similar passageway in your mind. The passage might be formed by a fist or a flower, a wound or an opportunity, a physical tunnel or an emotional challenge—any opening that leads you to the interior of a place or experience or idea you’ve never before even thought to imagine because it’s so well hidden from the outside.
Now consider as you write about that passage:
What you see from the outside before you begin your journey to the interior.
What compels you to enter.
What you feel as you begin your journey, and why those emotions erupt.
What you discover as you move inward.
What you lose as you leave the outer world behind.
What surprises you about yourself as you progress.
What distinguishes the interior you now find from the exterior you left behind.
How this movement to the inside moves or changes you.
Your feelings about returning to the external world after you’ve seen what’s inside.
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.
Annelise Riles writes Everyday Ambassador :
Homi Hormasji writes Homi Hormasji :
Patricia J Wentzel writes Disordered Chronicles :
