WRITING PROMPTS TO BENEFIT CHILDREN IN GAZA
UNICEF reports that in Gaza, “hundreds of thousands of children and families are caught in a catastrophic situation” and that, as of November 4th 2023, over 3700 children have been killed and more than 7000 have been injured “due to unrelenting attacks”, while a thousand others are missing. Outlining the charity’s Appeal for Children in Gaza, UNICEF spokesman James Elder explains: “Gaza has become a graveyard for thousands of children. It’s a living hell for everyone else.” Elder has also called for “children held hostage in Gaza [to] be immediately reunited with their families and loved ones”. Recent updates state that “hundreds of thousands of children … remain trapped in a war zone with little or no access to food, water, electricity, medicine or medical care”.
For the duration of NaNoWriMo, we will be posting a writing prompt every day and in doing so, we are hoping to encourage our community to donate to charities providing medical aid to children in desperate need in this unprecedented crisis.
These prompts have been created by writers from Wales or with a connection to Wales and its magazines and presses. The prompts are on all kinds of subjects, but many are related to anti-violence and the work of empathy, and they are offered with the simple hope that they might encourage people to donate in support of medical aid in Gaza. We include a list of suggested charities to donate to below, highlighting the Appeal to Children in Gaza.
UNICEF “continues to call for an immediate ceasefire as 1.1 million people — nearly half of them children — in northern Gaza have been warned to move out of the way of a widescale military assault, but with nowhere safe for them to go”. Elder concludes: “The humanitarian situation has reached lethal lows, and yet all reports point to further attacks. Compassion – and international law – must prevail.”
Please see the list of suggested charities at the end of the post. A new prompt will be posted until at least the end of November.
DAY 5: HELEN BOWELL
Interconnections
Although I’m not sure I agree that every poem needs to traumatise you, as Alan Buckley writes in Magma, I do find something interesting about poets’ and therapists’ parallel practice of exploring unconscious mental connections, and particularly the following paragraph:
“Extreme interconnectedness is, of course, also part of the poet’s stock-in-trade, the willingness to put any two things together in the belief that something new and enlivening might be sparked through the process of connecting them. To explore this, I tried to conjure up two words that were at least superficially unconnected, which of course is like trying to look relaxed when you’re waiting for someone to turn up for a first date. I came up with “marmalade passion”, and was just starting to think about the context I’d need to create in a poem for the metaphor to work when I noticed that I was already feverishly drawing links – marmalade is made of fruit, and there are passion fruits, passion is often said to be devouring, and one might devour toast that’s smothered in marmalade, then it’s but a skip from smother to mother, and a whole host of further associations. Of course, this word pairing in itself can’t be guaranteed to lead to, or even be part of, a good poem. But what I can see already is that there is something in there that can trigger the brain into a rapid and slightly obsessive exploration of connections and connotations.”
In this spirit, I challenge you to bring two random words together as the inspiration for your poem. You can just pick two random words, of course, but if you prefer, here’s another way of going about it:
1. Open a random book at a random page and pick 5 nouns. Write them down.
2. Open another random book to another random page and pick 5 more nouns. Write them down.
3. Put the nouns randomly into pairs.
4. Pick one of the pairs. Spend a minute trying to think about how these two words might be connected, what sentence or story there would be to bring them together.
5. Write a poem.
6. If you like, rinse and repeat.
Please consider donating to a charity providing medical aid in Gaza. We recommend UNICEF’s Appeal for Children in Gaza, but other charities include:
Palestine Children’s Relief Fund
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