Stories on This Week's Writing Prompt
Featured Story
There Was a Fire Here
Excerpted from my memoir, There Was a Fire Here. October 20, 1991. Oakland, California — There was a fire here. It started [...]
Readers’ Choice
The End of the Innocence
It was November of my eighth grade year. For our last period of the day, the girls had home economics and the boys had a free [...]
My First Experience with a Computer was a Disaster
Disaster struck. My thesis had vanished. The computer had eaten it and refused to spit it out.
Cakequake
"[D]isasters" are inherently subjective; they are in the eye of the beholder. As Mel Brooks noted, "Tragedy is when I cut [...]
Lucky’s Afghans: a 20th-century disaster
How do you reconcile heartbreak and fear, sadness and jeopardy, and the sense that everything is ending? You don’t.
Not a Dream #1
“There would have been no rescue here!” The fire marshal held my arm as fiercely as my gaze, neither of us paying attention [...]
How many disasters can you fit on the head of a pin?
When my first husband and I separated, I took my nine month old daughter and moved back to Houston. At the time I still [...]
Disaster: An Actor Who Can’t B Natural
It is 1986, and they are casting the original Broadway company of "Les Miserables." I want to play Jean Valjean.
Flood
The call came very early that August morning in 2007. We were both still in bed on the island of Martha’s Vineyard. I [...]
Do You See The Darkness Or The Light
Personally I feel what most people consider a disaster in reality is quite the contraire. Not at all unlike the way most [...]
Stories from the Previous Prompt
The Garden
In Vino Communitas
How can I convey the childish joy of wading around the tubs as the grapes squished and squirted between our toes?
Checkbook Gardener
I have a notorious black thumb. I killed a philodendron in my college dorm room and those things are indestructible. I killed [...]
Other Recent Stories
Black Magic
Each time I respond to a post, Facebook uses it to categorize and phenotype me, to slice and dice my likes and comments and [...]
Prompted By The Social Network
Information Pollution
I recently heard Nicco Mele, head of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard, speak. He [...]
Prompted By The Social Network
shopping
(everything you buy in your session supports Retrospect)