Writer's Crcle Prompt: Rarity Hunger // Climbing tree

 

Prompt RARITY: Hunger

When I started writing to the prompt of rarity, I tried to think of something rare and beautiful like a gem, a flower, or a butterfly.  And, indeed, I did think of them: jade, edelweiss, and little white butterflies.  I also tried to come up with short funny stories—pretty rare with me.  But my mind kept coming back to Gaza and food and water scarcity, whereas what’s rare with me is hunger:

I pledged to fast on World Hunger Day, May 28^th,
But was weak-willed on the follow through. 
I had sandwich meat and lettuce in the fridge,
and cookies in my kitchen cabinet. 
 
If those who hunger had the same backup,
we wouldn’t be talking about genocide.
War and climate emergencies have left shelves
truly empty.  Store shelves are empty, too.
 
People are rioting for food at the few
UN stations that are open in Gaza.
The news isn’t broadcasting what’s happening
in Sudan, so it could be even worse there.
 
And I cannot even make it through a one day
fast without eating what’s on my shelves.
I would not survive the food famines of
our times.   Here the market is open.
 
What is rare in Gaza is a loaf of
bread and a bottle of wine—or water.
What is rare with me is hunger. 

 Of course, I am using the words incorrectly.  Rare or rarity refers to something precious and more so because there is little of it, whereas scarce and scarcity refers to something generally abundant but not here and now.  So is hunger rare or scarce with me?  And is food rare or scarce in Gaza?

Prompt: RarityClimbing tree

We had a perfect pine tree to grow up with.  It was a long-needled pine located on the top of wooded hill.  Alongside it ran a low stone wall made from the shale and rock of the hill and field that must have lived behind it at one time.  The pines there seemed young next to our perfect pine tree, since they were all easy to reach around with a child’s arms.  Our white pine could only be reached around with two children’s arms open wide.  Its lower branches touched the ground and the wall.  It was our climbing tree.  Three children often sat in the lower branches, swinging our legs and watching our mother or grandmother sketch.  I would climb to the second level, but my bother climbed up to the height where branches were too close together to navigate. For me, the long-needled pine was also a story tree.  The carpet of orange pine needles, especially where it touched the stone wall, seemed the perfect place for fairies and elves to have their homes.  The dog Mitzi, who ran up the hill alongside us, sniffed at the tiny doorways like a hungry monster looking for prey.  The occasional chipmunk who ran along the wall didn’t alter my stories.  After all, in the tree I was the height of a giant myself, and nothing could reach me.  

Arcadia in the Catskills
by Susan L. Chast
 
Neither sheep nor shepherds populate the canvasses
of the Hudson River School of painters and Mother
concurs in her renderings of river banks where spring-
flowering apple and cherry orchards turn to small fruit
by the 4^th of July when the corn is knee high and heat
tricks maple leaves into early oranges among pine-needled
forests where grew the climbing tree.  
 
She drew the long-limbed pine while I watched chipmunks
and fairies run and hide from me in reindeer-mossed
hobbit homes under the brown-skinned roots
of the ancient tree surrounded with rattlesnake-filled
stone walls where cows once grazed in the old days. 
I climbed quietly to a still low limb to scout until pine  
tickled my nose into a sneeze.
 
Later I dreamed untamed forests full of elves, lost
ghosts knocking on our walls and windows, and magic
so loud I couldn’t sleep and indeed the morning footprints
dotted across the driveway could have been their horses
and not the deer trespassing to chew lettuce
with the rabbits, little Peter Cotton tail in the lead
as they ran before the morning sun
 
I leaned my rake against the fence, clothes pinned
the towels on the line until they swept the ground,
and scolded the crows and red-winged blackbirds,
robins, and starlings and swifts  not to eat
the mulberries over the fresh wash and to leave
some on the tree for me to eat with milk before
I visited the climbing tree.
 
Was it gone?  Did it Brigadoon away when the night 
moon played tricks on pathways and tree limbs?
 One more rise, to climb and then another—
I knew it was closer yesterday but not as close as when
my older brother or mom came along to play or when
the faeries slipped a dime under my pillow
in exchange for a tooth.
 
Where did the faeries put the teeth?  I scuffed
the thick mat of rusty needles to find them,
reached into nooks and climbed higher to see
if they used my teeth up in the tree –and I knew
mom laughed at me, but she also told me stories
when my grandfather’s geese chased her,  bit her
heels and chased her home
 
That is when Rip Van Winkle started bowling
the skies turned angry with fat cheeks blowing
hard to shake us from the limbs--and this time
everyone ran: elves and faeries, mom and brother
and me, deer, rabbit, horses, ghosts, leaves and rattle
snakes just like the cards in Alice’s trial leaping
and falling for shelter and towels and naps
and dreams.
 

© 2025 Susan L. Chast

Writer's Circle Prompts.

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Writers Circle Prompt: Red

 
1.    Red shoes
2.    Red dress
3.    redress
4.    Red sky in the morning
5.    Danger
6.    Stop
7.    Red roses
8.    Love
9.    Valentines
10.   Red pen
11.   Fresh blood
12.   Aggression
13.   Passion
14.   Scarlet
15.   Seeing red
16.   Red car
17.   Red sox
18.   Red hat
19.   Red nail polish
20.   Red shawl
21.   Red hair
22.   In the red
23.   Red crayon
24.   Red states and blue states
25.   The Reds
26.   Cardinal
27.   Cincinnati
28.   Robin red-breast
29.   Red carpet
30.   Hollywood
31.   Tomatoes
32.   Apples
33.   Strawberries
34.   Raspberries
 

source

 Seeing Red

Clearly there’s not enough red in my life.  I brainstormed for 25 minutes on the topic, and came up with 33 red items and associations that I have no story about at all, things like red dress, red nail polish, red carpet, fresh blood, red states, and cardinals.

I owned a red car once during the time I was an assistant professor at the College of William and Mary.  I was stopped by the police 2x in it for speeding.  I argued that I was going the same speed as everyone else, but was stopped because my car was red.  No one listened.  I paid the tickets and that was that.    I have a red shawl that I use as a throw for a living room chair.  It was not a gift but an impulsive purchase.  There are no stories here.

I have never been "a red"—neither communist nor a fan of the Red Sox, Cardinals or Cincinnati reds.   I love cardinals, the bright bird of winters in the northeast.  I love red raspberries, red apples, and red skies. 

Red morning skies mean danger or bad weather.  Red alerts.  I put red Band-Aids on scratches to hide the angry red blood.   I wish band-aids could stop death from aggression and war, but others say “No more Band-Aids.  We want a real solution.”  Yes.  Just the same, I wish they’d stop on all sides.  I draw their blood with red crayons. 

I edit poems with red pens.  Red is the color of passion, of love, of valentines, of roses (though I prefer yellow ones).  Red is the color of the carpet that honors royalty and sets off the clothing of Hollywood film stars. 

There is more red in my life than there is yellow or orange.  You see it in my clothes and my living room rug and chairs. 

No apologies.
Red bursts on the scene and stops
movement. Then turns green.
 

© 2025 Susan L. Chast

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Writers circle prompt: May

Mayday—

1)    Said three times, a distress signal.

2)    Pagans raise maypoles and weave their way around them for fertility and spring.

3)    Workers unite, celebration of working people.

4)    And last year, my mother’s death.

I’ll never be able to separate them now

I remember Mom telling me she was a red-diaper baby, carried by her mom and dad in May Day parades.  That marchers were beaten in NYC streets—something she was always worried would happen to me as I protested the war in Vietnam. She told me stories my grandmother never told me of grandpa unionizing a cloth factory and publishing a newspaper in the 1930s.  She said that the move to upstate NY came in the 1940s because of her family’s safety in the MacCarthy era.  How nothing changes--government hearings occur and recur and blur the faces of corporate bosses and law enforcement.  Paperwork haunts the innocent in the end, she said.  So, take no pictures and give no names if we go to NYC or DC in the front lines of anti-war protests: Soldiers are workers, too, coerced to kill workers abroad while the need for war on poverty grows.  Mom didn’t move upstate with her folks, but stayed in the NYC for her work with GE, manufacturing radios.  It was there that she met my father, at union meetings.  They married on the 21^st of February 1947, and moved upstate to live in Mom’s parents’ house where Mom became a housewife and mother. 

May Day was about workers, about uniting them at first and second about celebrating them.  Not work in the home like many women and children did, but workers earning a living through their valuable labor, workers that needed unions to fight for better working conditions.  Women’s issues and conditions in the home were not to be my issues until college when I discovered feminism.    

At this point, I did a google and wiki search for GE manufacturing of radios in the 1940s but couldn’t find any NYC locations.  Mom had told a story about a fire starting in her work station there—a fire quickly put out—because it threatened her notes on Union organizing that she kept on a shelf there.  I found nothing.  My story changed to me learning about work outside the home.

I remember myself as a bespectacled 12-year-old Girl Scout learning about work.  I attended a summer girl scout camp in the woods behind Jonas Studios—the location where sculptor and artist Jonas made life-sized moving dinosaurs for the 1964 World’s Fair.  A skinny-legged girl, I crowded around the mold-makers of fiberglass giants, asking questions and lingering to see the sweat behind graceful sculptures in the days when work was plentiful and beauty, too.  

Then, I skipped down the path eagerly to flag raising and our girl scout roster of chores.  Together two of us grabbed the bucket with too-sweet smelling pink goop to swab outhouse seats and come back again with the box of lime, and work done, scrubbed skin off fingers and arms to put on bathing suits and jump into the cool buggy lake happy to earn the reward: hotdogs and corn on the cob and songs, games and crafts: little red glass bead necklaces, yellow macaroni name tags, and pasty fingers.  Over and over, we washed hands as the day ended and skipped up the path, to linger with the dinosaur parts, climb aboard the bus home to meet "What did you do today?" I answered with few displays and many descriptions of outhouse chores and clay molds for moving dinosaurs.

 

© 2025 Susan L. Chast

Writer's Circle Prompts.

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Alexander technique Constructive rest

 

Writers Circle Prompt: How do I experience power and powerlessness?

How do I experience power and powerlessness?  

I.

The first thing that popped into my head is my powerlessness in the face of war with its destruction and annihilation.  Military powers persist at war.  Few have the power to survive it.  

Only chance leaves me out of wars.  I feel powerless to stop them.  I feel powerless even to affect the news blackout that hides the worst of the atrocities.  I fantasize that a crowd of Americans or a mass of Quakers from around the world could stop war if we were willing to become human shields.  I recall the photo of one man stopping a line of tanks in Tiananmen Square—if he stopped them.  I recall the journals of Rachel Corrie, the American women standing on a porch of a Palestinian house.  She was mowed down by a tank.  Would it have made a difference if more people had been willing to defy and die?  It made a difference in Gandhi’s India.  Non-violent people were beaten and shot and killed on the way to gaining home rule.  And they won.  Much fewer people died than would have died in a war.  Those who died in this non-cooperation effort turned powerlessness into power.  The cost was their lives.  Could I do that?

No.  I don't have the courage to defy bombs, tanks, guns, or even the commands of a tyrant.  (Well, I might have the courage to defy the commands of Trump, if he stops tampering with free speech.  Time will tell.)  Right now I experience power only in the manipulation of words, regardless of whether or not I write in an acceptable form, or spend time shaping the artistry of my expression. But often the words sit in my computer rather than go public.

Two people here remind me how to have empowerment in public.  They have stepped into crowds of protestors holding signs and chanting.  Week days, they sit at the spot where the driveway of our retirement community meets a 4-lane avenue.  They hold up signs so the issues stay in the minds of the people driving home from work.  They count the beeps of supporters.  I have joined them twice so far.  The mood is cheerful, though the need for action is serious.  I felt empowered on that corner.  Again, I am merely using words, but using them publicly makes a difference between feeling empowered or powerless.  

II.

Thinking about this led me to reflect on the part of my life I spent as a director of educational theatre (at five collages SUNYA, UC Berkeley, Wells Collage, The Collage of William and Mary, and Bucknell University).  I was rarely the person who performed, but in rehearsal I felt the power to shape scenes and to empower students to find their roles, relationships, and objectives.  I think I revealed their power, a large use of courage in a small environment.  I came home each day satisfied, fulfilled.  The finished art had power, too, in public performance.  But I am very aware, as Plato and Augustus Boal remind us, that no one can think that playing a soldier or king on stage makes them a soldier or king in life.  My backstage empowerment in the role of director does not transfer into performative courage--power--outside the theatre.

Once though, in a production I helped to shape called “It is Better to Speak,” my collective of theatre activists took the drama from the stage to the street to give energy and encouragement to anti-war protestors (at the Women’s Encampment for a Future of Peace and Justice). We built a play with a juxtaposition of scenes of powerlessness with scenes of hope, using material that we gathered from activists across the USA--their poetry, songs, anecdotes, and newspaper articles.  Even those watching, therefore, helped to create the play.   We didn’t tell a story so much as build and then release tension scene by scene about the proliferation of nuclear weapons and how weapons were used in the past.  We sometimes narrated and sometimes danced the material, finding moves to enhance the words we were saying, particularly those from survivors of Hiroshima.  The brilliance of the material was that it travelled reshaped, depending on which performers were available.  In the audiences, we saw tears.  After the performances we were often thanked for the depth of the experience. I would love to participate in street theatre again.

We took the title of the production, "It is better to speak" from Audre Lorde's poem “A Litany for Survival.” Speaking out of her experience as a Black woman and lesbian, she said:

. . . when we speak we are afraid
our words will not be heard
nor welcomed
but when we are silent
we are still afraid
 
So it is better to speak
remembering
we were never meant to survive.

© 2025 Susan L. Chast

Writer's Circle Prompts.

Please respect my copyright.