I Love My Squid

I’m coming out of a serious depressive/awful self-care phase, and my creativity was drained during it. Drained is the wrong word–it’s more like being covered with a gigantic, turd-like pile of cement that never gets completely set but surrounds you and chokes you into immobility. Also, the cement really smells.

I’m grateful to be coming out of it, and am trying to coax my creativity and sense of pleasure out of the woodwork by looking at some of my old scribbled notes. One page brought a smile to my face: I’d been playing with a poetry exercise cited in a book (whose title I unfortunately can’t remember.) The exercise was called “Bad Titles” and was meant to lower inhibitions about beginning a poem.

Every student has five minutes to write a list of 20 terrible poem titles. They can be terrible because they seem nonsensical, or really boring, or distasteful–anything goes. Then they pick two favorites, toss them into a bag, and the titles are mixed and randomly assigned to class members for a writing period.

Some of mine included:

High Protein Wedding
The Apple That Time Forgot
What I Saw in the Shower This Morning
The Letter W

and the two I selected as my favorites, Long Walks on the Peach and I Love My Squid. I wasn’t in a group, so I couldn’t be assigned someone else’s bad titles. But I took those two and wrote something. The first one actually turned into a keeper, and I ended up with a silly but fun rough draft for the second.

I hope to be creating again soon. I have three stage-1 ideas incubating right now, and if I can abstain from self-sabotage they will develop and give me pleasure. And you know what? Make that four, because I just got an idea for The Apple That Time Forgot!