Tag Archives: where I’m from

NaBloPoMo #9: from echo and hope and worry

Another of the prompts we used during the AI writing group I offered for Sade Huron’s class was the classic poem “Where I’m from” by George Ella Lyon. I’ve used this prompt repeatedly (as have many, many other facilitators), and it never fails to bring  a new spin on the introductory autobiography — rather than telling simple facts about the who/what/where/when of our histories, we get into sensory detail and metaphor.

We were doing 5-minute writes, and here’s what came up for me:

I’m from echo and hope and worry. Take home that longing. I’m from red brick dust and the smell of old cows and dice and scrub canyon and loss. I’m from cottonwood and gas lamp and Laura Ingalls Wilder, the smell I imagined my grandfather lived in when he was a little boy in a sod house, his bedroom with his parents dug deep into the ground. Stop running, stop running. I’m from cornfield and wheat grass and monarch butterflies kept tight in the moonshine, no, the moon flower, no, the marsh grass, no, the milkweed, and fluttering, hollow and cherry, on the front grill of my father’s 1972 vw bus.