The Waterbearers Writing Prompts
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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 a quoted author whose brilliant work has helped shape thought, art, and inner work. Please remember to credit Sasha Bonét or any other author with either their full quote and name or with the appropriate “after (author’s name)” beneath the title of your own work.
Waterbearers
“I’m talkin’ bout balance. Flat-footed strides grounded so deep into the earth it look like she sinkin’ when she actually sproutin’. Cause she of it. Sure of a path nobody but god can see. I’m talkin bout no map, no pavin, no clue where to find it, but somehow she gonna get it. I’m talkin’ sweat above her lip and mud beneath her nails. You know who I’m talkin’ bout.”
-Sasha Bonét, The Waterbearers
In the Prelude, Sasha defines her own meaning of Waterbearer. “I mean, carrying all that weight,” she writes. When she says water, she means “lifeforce… ancestral inheritance, the water of the womb, all that mama tried to shield you from, but you got in honest. I mean bloodline, all that you dare not say and you bet not ask came to you through that water. Water so pure it don’t tell no lies. That water damn near broke her back, but she’d die before she let somebody take what belongs to her. That water’s all she has to call her own, and she’ll give it all to you. And won’t even burden you with the tale of how she’s made it across the valley.”
Think of your ancestors, of the women and gender queer elders who came before you. Think of the water of your bloodline, of your ancestral inheritance, of the ones who carried so much it nearly broke their backs. Think of the stories you’ve never heard, the admissions of a weight that was too much for one person. And then write what Waterbearer means to you, culled from your own family history.
Living Room Tribunals
Sasha talks about growing up surrounded by aunties, Betty Jean, cousins, and brothers. She recalls the living room at 50 10 as a place where the women gathered like a tribunal. The children on the floor, the women on the couches and chairs. Where did the women gather in your childhood? What were the roles assigned to everyone in the room? Where were you? What did you witness there?
A Prayer is a Manifestation of The Elders
“Somewhere, my grandmother’s praying. A prayer is but a manifestation and the thought of my life being willed by the manifestation of my grandmother always made me feel like she wouldn’t let me lose.”
-Sasha Bonet, The Waterbearers
Who has manifested you into being, into liberation, into winning? Whose prayers or spells or manifestations have elevated you, carried you, comforted you, surrounded you?
Madness
Sasha talks openly about her mother’s deteriorating mental health, and about the long history America has with declaring Black women mad or insane or unfit. She challenges that pattern while also naming some of her mother’s behaviors that weighed on her. Their relationship remained complicated - both a comfort and a thing to brace herself for. Who have you loved and stayed tethered to even as they unraveled, causing harm for you, too? In what ways were your perceptions influenced by systemic patterns? Can you write in a way that tells the whole truth as it was for you? Allowing the love and the grief equal seats in the story?
The Sacred Space Between Aliveness and Submersion
“It is only here in the sacred space between aliveness and submersion that you can be carried. But you must relinquish the fear of being taken under. This precarity is where Black women have endured, built lives, and even dared to love with the weight of a nation on their hips. The same nation that is responsible for all of this forgetfulness, telling us we don’t live lives worth remembering. To my mother and to her mother, I say, give it all to me. Allow me to carry this for us. Allow me to disentangle all of this beauty that’s tethered to all this pain.”
- Sasha Bonét, The Waterbearers
Sasha has named an in-between, a thin place. Between aliveness and submersion is a sacred space - and it is the only place you can be carried. But the cost of entry is a willingness to be taken under. She identifies this uncertain, risky space as one Black women have endured and made homes in. She has also occupied the space between aliveness and submersion, but because of the Waterbearers who came before her, Sasha can weather it a little differently. She has access to resources and opportunities that her mother, grandmother, and recent ancestors did not. Rather than resenting the struggle, madness, harshness, or flaws of her mother and grandmother, Sasha sees herself as an alchemizer. She sees them for what they are, but she also sees the circumstances that shaped them. It is such an enormous act of love that can only happen when we are fully woven into the larger web, to say, “Give it all to me. Allow me to carry this for us. Allow me to disentangle all of this beauty that’s tethered to all this pain.”
Can you look back on the circumstances that shaped your mother and grandmother? Or anyone who held those roles for you (reminder that not all mothers are women)? Rather than seeing yourself as separate from those circumstances, can you investigate the ways you might have been spared some of them? If it feels safe enough to sit with this, what’s one thing you will never have to face or be or carry because they did it for you? Where are you willing to disentangle beauty from pain?
The F Is For Fire
When Sasha tells the story of naming her daughter Sofia, she confesses she does not like the name. She allowed it because her daughter’s father insisted she name her Sophia or he would refuse to see her. So, in a trickster move, Sasha gave her daughter something in the spelling of her name. The F, she wrote, is for Fire.
Choose one letter of something named in part or in whole because of the demand of a man, and tell us what it really stands for.
Sometimes A Mother Must Do The Unthinkable
“Sometimes a mother must do the unthinkable just so she can tell them they can too.”
-Sasha Bonét
Writing about Louise Little, the mother of Malcom X, Sasha brings us into a story about a Black mother holding the threshold of her home late at night against white klansmen. They expected her to be, as Sasha writes, like their own meek wives. Louise was not. She held that ground, putting her pregnant belly between the men and her children hiding inside the home. Malcom was there with her, Sasha says. The fury and courage and adrenaline coursing through Louise’s body coursed through his, too. Even in the womb, he was preparing for a lifelong fight. Even before he was born, he was holding a threshold between white supremacy and his family.
Tell a story about a mother (again, gender does not apply here) who has held a threshold, who has done the unthinkable, so the ones who follow know that they can, too.
The Two Things
“What are the two things I must do or die?”
-Toni Morrison
Toni Morrison’s answer to this question was ‘write and mother.’ These were the two things that burned in her bones and demanded her lifeblood. What are yours? Even if they seem ill-fitting, write them boldly and gently. What two things must you do or die?
Mother As A Verb
Following the previous prompt, Morrison saw mother as a verb. As an action. She challenged the idea that it was passive or just an identity, instead recognizing it as a way to move through the world. So, one of the things she must do or die - mother - began to take a larger shape. Choose one of your own two things and turn it into a verb. What changes?
She Would Be Left Holding My Bitterness
“If I didn’t follow my dreams, I would resent my child, and she would be left holding my bitterness.”
-Sasha Bonét, The Waterbearers
Who in your life seemingly blocks your dreams? Who requires parts of you that want to stretch in other directions? Write yourself into the living flow of your dreams, acknowledging that otherwise that person will be left holding your bitterness. Rather than limiting yourself to only two options, create more. Write yourself a mapline.
Who Chose
“She wanted it to be known that she was a woman who chose. That everywhere she ended up, it was because she chose the bridges, she chose the pivots, she chose her own shade tree. Even if the path led to nowhere, but especially when the path led to water.”
-Sasha Bonét, on her grandmother Betty Jean
If someone were to eulogize you, what would they say? Were you a person who chose? Were you something else? Get creative, sink into your inner territory, and explore the throughlines of your soul. How have you lived? What has been important to you? When you are gone, what do you want someone who loved you and knew you to say?
The Space Our Mothers Couldn’t Reach
“She had been the one to fill in the space that our mothers couldn’t reach.”
-Sasha Bonét, The Waterbearers
Betty Jean had been the one to fill in spaces for her grandchildren, even for others. She had been home base, the matriarch, the one to call in an emergency. In little and large ways, she had done what her daughters couldn’t. Her own mother had done the same for her. This is communal living. It is what it means to exist within the ecosystem of a village. Who has filled the space your own mother couldn’t reach? Who filled those spaces before her?
The Meaning of Water
“This is the lineage from which I come. So when I tell you I come from the water, this is what I mean. All the Black people of the Americas come from these troubled waters. No one is untouched by these terrors. even when they try to erase and revise the past. Even when these histories aren’t recorded in documents, they live in our bones. in our marrow. They live in the in-between part.
Sasha Bonét, The Waterbearers
Sasha is writing about a collective trauma, a deeply ancestral and unifying grief and loss. She is talking about the water as a womb and a tomb, an archive of an entire people group’s history. Water, in this context, is complicated. Earlier, she describes the hurricanes in Houston and her identification as being of a people who need to stay near shorelines. “When living in nations that don’t claim us as their own. Placelessness,” she writes. Black people in America are of the water because the water is also placeless.
What did you learn about America in this book? What rattled you, unsettled you, grieved you? We do not write from the perspective of marginalized people (unless it is our own experience), but we do write about our unconscious participation in and divestment from it. What have you learned about placelessness here? Recognizing that it is not just about geography, but also about systems, politics, and insidious whiteness woven into seemingly ordinary social habits, perspectives, and ideas, what has changed for you?
Writing prompts culled from the memoir The Waterbearers by Sasha Bonét
