Just one week left on our thirty-day challenge, and today we’re resharing a prompt from early in our time together—from early last spring.
It’s from Kiese Laymon, a professor of English and creative writing at the University of Mississippi who has been described as “the chief blues scribe of our time.” It’s no exaggeration to say that he is one of my favorite: I read his book Heavy: An American Memoir, three times.
It’s such an honor to share this prompt from Kiese. We hope it helps you see things from a different point of view.
Suleika
The Hat in Canal Street by Kiese Laymon
I often use the comic as a way into memories I'd rather forget. For example, I once did a public conversation with Jesmyn Ward in New Orleans—and everyone who knows me knows I believe she’s the world’s most influential living writer. The event was amazing, and afterward one of the organizers gave me a ride back to the hotel. As I got out of her car, a gust of wind blew my hat off my head.
It’s 9:30 on a Friday night and I'm in the middle of Canal Street with my hat on the ground. This might not seem like a big deal, but I have two arthritic hips that are bone-on-bone, and if I bend down to get that hat, there might be no getting up. But I don’t want to be that guy in front of the events’ organizer and all the folks on the street. Sigh. I bend down, I fall. From my knees, I put the hat back on my head. I try to get up again. The hat flies off once more. I fall again, busting my knee. Some beautiful Black boys walk by me. One says, "That dude drunk as hell,” and they laugh. (I do not drink.) So there I am, bloody-kneed, still two feet from my hat. I see two police officers across the street, heading my way. I don't want to have to answer their questions. I don't want to need their help to get up. So leaving my hat in the street, I crawl to the curb and pull myself up. I limp back over to my hat and start kicking it out of the street, over the curb, toward the entrance of the hotel. There, I lean on a column, put my grimy hat on my head and shuffle up to my room.
I was too embarrassed to tell this story out loud until I considered it from the hat's point of view. To that hat, it must have seemed absurd, even slapstick. I could hear the hat’s laughter, and that ushered me back into the moment, the memory, the scene.
Your prompt for today:
What’s the funniest thing that happened to you last year? Write a paragraph from the point of view of an inanimate object that bore witness to it. Could be your hat. Could be your wedding ring, a streetlamp or the plant in the corner of the bar. Use as much sensory/sensual language as possible to describe the memory from that object’s perspective.