Create your own writing prompts with ease

Blank pages come in myriad forms. Ghostly rectangles on desktop screens. College-lined blue on white cheap paper. Yellow schoolchild tablets. Heavy pebbly stationary with a monogram. Yet they have a commonality: blank pages beg to be filled. With writing.

I prefer the blank white of my desktop. My fingers can fill a page up in no time at all, except when they can’t. When I’ve hit a wall and don’t know what to write next or what to write at all. Those are the times I need a prod, a prompt, a reset.

…

Designer Alissa Bertrand of Jabellafleur thrifts and upcycles her way to success

The original shopper certainly must have paid a good price for the curtain. Textured as only real silk can be, the coral, bronze, and teal panel would have added warmth and sophistication to any home. But by unknowable means, the discarded piece made its way to a Georgia thrift shop and waited. Waited to be purchased for less than a dollar, waited to be hung on another curtain rod.

Then one day, Alissa Bertrand breezed in and, like a magician, plunked down ninety-nine cents and swept the piece…

Passed down for generations, a family’s history beckons to be known

Leggy geraniums splashed their red against the window. Through its panes, May watched streams of students, like bees winging to flowers, crisscross the University green. Ornate sandstone and limestone buildings ringed the oval lawn. Silent, sitting on a hard wooden chair at the end of the professor desk, she waited. With a start, she realized she’d been holding her breath.

Professor James T. Schmidt, Ph.D., French dialect expert, riffled through the papers in her shoebox with the precision and care of an archeologist. Every so often, he’d grunt “huh”…

Theatrical costuming wizardry tells us a story

The Times Square ticket agent shared bad news that April in 1968. Your Own Thing was sold out. I can still see him — a hefty old man with a New York accent. Most everyone was old to me those days. And I’m sure my heavy southern “Ohiah” accent sounded as peculiar to him as his did to me.

I was one of a hundred or so Ohio high schoolers bussed to study Eastern European current affairs in DC and New York City. For most, this trip was the first ever to a…

Profane, obscene, crude, or vulgar words have power. For writers, they can add accuracy and vividness to your dialogue. Used indiscriminately, excessively, or sloppily, bad language hampers your writing success.

Words often or usually classified as profane, obscene, or vulgar easily reach our eyes and ears. Bad language is ubiquitous nowadays. These bons mots have crept into songs, television and movie dialogue, news reports, and fallen readily from the lips of the mighty. TV ads hint at them with snarky word play. Terms for excrement, sexual acts, and abbreviations for them pepper written posts with the casualness of a walk…

A nineteenth century girl flees by train

Scurrying across the train platform, Lydia glanced over her shoulder. Dark grey clouds stretched from the horizon, barreling her way. An icy prickle of anxiety snaked up the back of her neck. She paused on the platform. What was she forgetting…She’d been so worried they’d catch her as she left.

A burly shoulder knocked her aside.

“Move long, Miss!” barked the conductor from his perch atop the steps. He jabbed a thumb skyward. “Cain’t you see a storm’s a’comin’?”

Tightening her grip on her valise, Lydia stumbled and nearly fell into the second-class…

A tale of Montreal in the 1970s and a cheese that screamed, “Steal me.”

June 1973, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

As a fit twenty-two-year-old, carrying her groceries up three flights of stairs to her apartment posed no problem. As a shoplifter, making it home undetected was the challenge.

Today, standing at the grocery cheese bin, a wedge of imported French grappe cheese, a favorite quarry, screamed, “Steal me.” So Gilly Smith did.

The Grappe, cured in the remains of winemaking, wore a pebbly coat of black grape seeds. Gilly loved the fruity echo of the cheese’s soft white interior. Though one of the most expensive cheeses…

You need to get married, girl

“You need to get married, girl. I don’t know what’s wrong with you. You’re nineteen years old, gettin’ long in the tooth for many a man,” grumbled Lily’s mother, Zelda, shuffling her Italian tarot cards. “Want me to run the cards and see what they say?”

The air hung hot and sticky in the rundown parlor room. Zelda’s clapboard cottage squatted on the floodplains of Wheeling, just two blocks from the Ohio River. Homes up on the surrounding hills might snag a breeze or two, but no wind made it down to the flats.

…