River Voice Writing Prompts
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Between May 8 and May 23, we're writing together! This is a call to everyone within Wild Soul, not just the ones who call themselves writers. Tapping into the Soul of Poetry is only one way we carry our Inner Territory work out into the world around us. So, even if it's just for 5 minutes a day, I invite you to sit down and write as a ritual, as an evolving mapline, as a way deeper into the churning, alive, dark, cosmic sacral sea of your own soul.
Here's what you need to know:
1. All first drafts are shit. They’re supposed to be. The shit is fertilizer, and we are looking to create something that is ALIVE and dirt-soaked and ancestral and brimming with possibilities. We are not interested in sanitized writing.
2. Early editing is weed killer to the most medicinal of our words. If we edit too soon, we’ll choke the life out of the most potent of our soul’s growth. So we’re going to do our best not to edit as we write. There’s always time and space to come back and edit later.
3. You can’t mess this up. You don’t even have to ever let anyone else read it. But there is no right or wrong. There is no good or bad. And, if you want to share your pieces inside the Signal chat or on your socials/Substack, I would love to celebrate every single word you've drawn from that ancient ancestral well. But what you do with it is entirely yours.
4.We are writing from quoted authors whose brilliant work has helped shape thought, art, and inner work. Please remember to credit each author with either their full quote and name or with the appropriate “after (author’s name)” beneath the title of your own work.
Outrun
“The thing about women from the river is that our currents are endless. We sometimes outrun ourselves.”
―Terese Marie Mailhot, Heart Berries: A Memoir
Begin from an origin point, a place where your voice was too large a river, too flooded with lore and story. Begin with a single place you ran from. Don’t overidealize or overanalyze. Just begin with a story about what made you run from yourself and hold it with as much fluid Third Way as you can muster. You were not good or bad. You were not right or wrong. You were not this or that. You were a creature in a moment of choice and you didn’t run for nothing. Why did you run? What did you run from?
We Manage That
“Be wild; that is how to clear the river. The river does not flow in polluted, we manage that. The river does not dry up, we block it.”
-Clarissa Pinkola Estes
Evoke an inner wild that clears the river of your voice. Even if for just a few moments, carry away debris, pollution, man-made dams, over resourcing. Bring back the salmon, the bears, the eagles, the crows. Feel out the different way you might begin to flow if the ecosystem of your voice were in cohesive, collaborative harmony. In part this prompt will require self-ownership. How have you contributed to or allowed your inner river to be blocked, dumped into, treated without reverence and care?
In The Sinking
"There is life in the sinking, the water at my feet says. Life in the descent, the aquifer's whisper intones."
-Jesmyn Ward, Let Us Descend
Tell us about your sinking, about your feet folded into the river bottom, about the descent into your voice and what it cost you. Tell us about the life it revealed, the way of being you would never have attempted to embody if you hadn’t walked all the way into the currents of your voice and let your body go liquid. Tell us about the water as a remembered first language.
Aware
“Every so often, something shatters like ice, and we are in the river of our existence. We are aware.”
- Louise Erdrich
Draw from a time something shattered the top layer of ice forming over your voice. Write about the sensation of shattering, of splintering. Write about the sudden rush of moving water, the ache of sudden change, and about the awareness that came with it all.
The Old Gods
"The old gods are everywhere," she says. "They swim in the river, and grow in the field, and sing in the woods."
- V.E. Schwab
Tell us about the old gods in your throat, in your inner river, in your voice. Tell us how to recognize them swimming through your words, your tone, your inflection. Tell us where they grow on the banks of your storytelling and how they’ve changed the course of your river voice.
Time Like Water
In her retellings of Greek myths, Madeline Miller uses rivers, tides, currents, and water itself to symbolize time passing. Write in a way that folds a past version of your voice into a future one. Can you make time move like water, not just forward, but around and over and under and through?
Shapeshifter
"I can change myself, but it's an effort. And it doesn't last. It's easier to do as water does: allow myself to be contained, and take on the shape of my containers."
- Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower
Write about a time your voice needed to be soft enough, flexible enough to fill a container. Can you create both sensation and visualization for what it was like to temporarily shape yourself to something that wasn’t you? Rather than seeing as it restraint, can you consider the ways the experience may have taught you how to shapeshift?
Between Our Teeth
"We sit by the river, silence between our teeth."
-Adrienne Rich
Write with a full voice, but with silence between your teeth. Like a ventriloquist. Notice as you write how silence may be a catalyst for new language, new expression, new writing muscles. Rather than pouring through your throat chakra, can you tell a story quietly, patiently, and with the sense of someone else sitting with you by the river?
Desert Rivers
"A land of lost rivers, with little in it to love; yet a land that once visited must be come back to inevitably."
- Mary Austin
Tell us about the land of lost rivers in you. Tell us about a barren place with little in it to love, and yet with a strong pull to return again and again. Tell us why you come back, what changes when you do, and what medicine there might be in the low desert rivers of your soul
Pray
“Many people live and die without ever confronting themselves in the darkness. Pray that one day, you will spin around at the water's edge, lean over, and be able to count yourself among the lucky.”
-Carmen Maria Machado
Use this prompt to recall a time you confronted yourself in the darkness. And, if you haven’t yet, use this prompt to begin. Not to shame what you find or even to run from it. But to love what is ugly, othered, and too dense to hold easily. Lean over the river of your voice, look into that moving water, and extract the blessing that only those who have faced their monsters are able to claim.
Of Course You Are
"Remember you are water. Of course you leave salt trails. Of course you are crying. Flow".
-adrienne maree brown
Write as if you are creating salt trails, inner maplines you’ve marked with tears. Acknowledge that this practice of remembering yourself has allowed you to flow, to not get stuck, to not stagnate.
Stays
“The salt stays on the skin.”
-Holly Ringland, The Seven Skins of Esther Wildling
This line is a way of saying that, after we’ve taken our grief to the water, we do not immediately wash away the salt. We let it dry on our skin, reminding us through the rest of the day that we’ve been marked and circled and held. Write your salt. Leave it on the skin of your life.
Ritual
"I want to stand by the river in my finest dress. I want to sing, strong and hard, and stomp my feet with a hundred others so that the waters hum with our happiness. I want to dance for the renewal of the world.”
- Robin Wall Kimmerer
Dig deep into your ancestry, find a ritual of renewal that would have been practiced by your pre-colonial ancestors. And then write yourself into it. Slip between the thin place of our oldest magic - poetry. Step into a renewal ritual and resurrect it.
Flooding is Remembering
“You know, they straightened out the Mississippi River in places, to make room for houses and livable acreage. Occasionally, the river floods these places. "Floods" is the word they use, but in fact, it is not flooding; it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be. All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. Writers are like that: remembering where we were, that valley we ran through, what the banks were like, the light that was there, and the route back to our original place. It is emotional memory - what the nerves and the skin remember, as well as how it appeared. And a rush of imagination is our "flooding.”
- Toni Morrison
Think of the ways your voice, your soul, your story, occasionally floods. Consider the ways it is simply remembering where it once was, where it longs to be again. Can you allow your writing to flood? To carry you back through perfect, intuitive memory, to where you were?
Entry
"Before entering the sea, a river trembles with fear... It has to let itself be free."
- Yaa Gyasi
Write yourself from the known waterways of rivers, of landscapes you have fed and been fed by all your life. Come to that wild threshold, the merging of fresh water and salt water. Tremble if you must (and you must), but write yourself free. Turned back into the larger body of the whole.
