Creative Closeness
PANDEMIC PROMPTSIn March of 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic began to surge in the United States, we saw our community programs grind to a halt. Being based in California, The Poetry Lab was shut down on March 19 due to the governor’s stay-at-home order. All of our planned events were postponed and later canceled when it became clear that the Coronavirus was much more serious than our federal government had lead us to believe. But resilience is a creative trait, and the community of artists we live and work within rallied to keep the arts an active part of everyone’s daily lives. Virtual open mics popped up on Instagram Live and Facebook, Zoom meetings became our coffee shops, wine bars, and school gymnasiums. It is during this time that #creativecloseness was born. Creative closeness was a series of writing prompts written and designed by our Director, Danielle Mitchell, to keep writers in our community creatively close even as they had to socially distance themselves in order to stay safe from the virus.
The #creativecloseness movement caught the eyes of our local paper was written up LBPost arts reporter Nancy Woo in late March. The full article, Creative closeness in a time of social distance, is available online.
Below you will find the complete set of #creativecloseness prompts, the most notable of which is Stack Books. Described by our Director as the best “quarantivity” she’d tried so far. The goal is to stack books on top of each other to create a poem from their titles. Followers were encouraged to take a photo of their book spines and share it under the hashtags #bookspinepoem and #creativecloseness. It’s an especially great activity to try with young ones using children’s book titles such as “If you give a mouse a cookie / where the sidewalk ends…”. We leave these prompts here for you to use as encouragement and inspiration. For more details about each prompt click to read the original Instagram caption. Some prompts have links to outside sources.
