PLACES — SEPTEMBER 30 WRITING PROMPT
Imagine Nation
An endlessly changing landscape in portrait
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There is a land that both exists and doesn’t;
A nation with no borders, wild — filled
With characters mundane and yet, fantastic.
They live — oh, how they live!
But in the dawning light of day, they fade
As steam that rises, vanishing,
Above volcanic depths of morning coffee.
I know they breathe upon the edges —
Vibrant edges — of peripheral memory,
Where they wait for me in dreams.
My favorite place in the whole world is one that, strictly speaking, you can never visit: My imagination.
What if we are all just figments of God’s imagination?
My imagination a melting pot of reality and fantasy; it’s a realm where I get to “play God.” Don’t all writers do that, really? I can visit the worlds I’ve created at any time — the trip costs nothing, not a cent. One minute, here, might be a hundred, there.
The trick is how to share it all with you, Dear Reader. Even if you could join me, the place is different every time. Just by being there, you would alter it. And I have only my inadequate writing skills — no matter how much you protest the word “inadequate,” they are that when it comes to showing you the worlds that exist inside my head. But that’s the trick, isn’t it?
Creating reality from illusion is the trick we writers practice, over and over, because it’s worth it when we word-magicians can get you to willingly suspend your disbelief and come along with us to places that you can never experience directly with your own eyes, ears, fingertips, nose, and mouth. If we succeed in probing your mind with ours, we can trigger sense memories where you can see, hear, feel, smell, and taste these places that will never be accessible to your corporeal body, and you may imagine, for an hour, that you live there. That you know the landscape, the people, the creatures as intimately as if you were one of them. You may imagine that you have never had an out-of-body experience, but I would argue that you…
