"This work is unlike any other, in its range of rich, conjuring imagery and its dexterity, its smart voice. Carroll-Hackett doesn’t spare us—but doesn’t save us—she draws a blueprint of power and class with her unflinching pivot: matter-of-fact and tender." —Jan Beatty

Archive for the ‘2016 Prompts’ Category

Daily Prompt Catch-Up <3 Family, and Heartbreak, and Fragility

 

Daily Prompt Catch-Up 

6/11/2016

Beautiful day with family today.

From “On Family Regathering Seen One Night Through a Window” by George Moor

All flows; the person has no permanence.
The children will grow up, the parents die.
For each precarious present the past tense
Is waiting; all is sort of a lie.
The clean cut fruit in dingy crystal bowls;
The fading chairs; the family sitting down.
For reassurance meet these traveling souls,
Each with an intimate sadness of his own.
Old habits calm. Old stories of old days….

Make art about family.

family

 

6/12/2016

Just don’t have words. Heartbroken.

orlando

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

6/13/2016

My son and I found this tiny nest yesterday, tumbled on the grass beneath the Guardian Oak. No babies, wounded or otherwise, in sight, just this miracle of weaving, bits of bark and straw and leaf and string. Inside the tiniest shards of shell left behind, thin and white as paper. I was struck at how delicate—and how strong—it is, kinda like Love.

Make art about the fragility, about the persistent strength, of Love.

nest

Daily Prompt <3 When the Ancestors Are Us

10 June 2016

Your ancestors will surround you as you sleep
             keep away ghosts of generals presidents       priests
             who hunger for your
             rare and tender tongue
             They will keep away ghosts
             so you have strength
             to battle the living
from “Tal’-s-go Gal’-quo-gi Di-del’-qua-s-do-di Tsa-la-gi Di-go-whe-li/ Beginning Cherokee” by QWO-LI DRISKILL

Make art about ancestors, about what we can do to be good ancestors. 

ancestors

 

Hundreds of Prompts! Right Here! :-)

Finally got around to getting this website updated 🙂

Including all those Daily Prompts! Right here! 

Check em out and get your creativity flowing! 

Mary Carroll-Hackett Daily Prompts!   

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Daily Prompt <3 "I'm nobody. Who are you?"

9 June 2016 

Having a bit of an identity crisis 🙂 Maybe not a crisis LOL 😀 but definitely a shift, some kind of transition, reinvention maybe. 

“I seem to have run in a great circle, and met myself again on the starting line.”― Jeanette Winterson

Make art about changes in identity, about shifting views of the self. 

door face to face

Daily Prompt <3 On Boys and Men

8 June 2016

This was one of my mama’s top favorite poems. I have so many memories of her reciting it, again and again. Thinking a lot lately about the sons I’ve raised, about the young men I teach, in a culture where there’s so little guidance, so many confusing messages, on what it means to be a man. 

Make art about boys, or about what it means to be a man. 

If

 

Daily Prompt <3 On Mothers and Making Home

7 June 2016

My sweet daughter Lia, a brand new mother to an amazing baby boy Max–I call him Little Star–is beautifully maneuvering her way with Love and tenderness through the new dance of parenting, and marriage as a parent, and her own professional work.

Another sweet young mother I know, one of the daughters of my heart, is in the process of making a new home for her two little ones, having made the courageous decision to leave a marriage that wasn’t working or healthy, for her or her babies.

So I watch them in awe, as my own son used to say, “like we were just us, a crew on our own little pirate ship!”when his brother and sister and he and I were in the same place, me a mom making a home for us 🙂

How these young women astound and inspire me 🙂 how I admire them ❤ 

Make art about mothers, or about the daily rituals that go into making a home. 

loveeverafter-2

Art by Katie m. Berggren

 

 

 

 

Daily Prompt <3 Out in the Field

5 June 2016

“In a field /I am the absence/of field.”~Mark Strand

Make art about absence, about being out in the field, about who you are in the field. 

hay20field

 

Daily Prompt <3 What I Wish For You

4 June 2016

It’s a John Denver morning. 

“If I had a wish that I could wish for you, I’d make a wish for sunshine all the while.” 

Make art about what you wish for someone else. 

A Dream, A Meditation, and A Prompt: Ecosystems

 

I dreamt my husband and mama, both gone now for years, having walked on to the next life, were helping me in the garden, setting up two new raised beds, working the dark rich soil with rakes and with our hands. I was planting turnips, the seeds so small, so many shades of purple, lavender, violet, plum, deep purply rose. “Plant cabbage with them,” Mama said, “Good companions.” John nodded, “Or spinach, or peas.” He grinned. “They like each other.”

I woke up thinking about companion planting, about ecosystems.

Ecology is all about interconnection and eternal change, creating patterns, connection, cause and effect, that shape every organism and phenomenon. Our own minds work this way, but, I wonder, Can we step back and recognize that? Can we extend that eco-understanding beyond our needs, thinking like an ecosystem”? Recognizing, developing, and honoring our “eco-mind”?

Wouldn’t an eco-mind also able to see that the survival of our own species, our own existence, our own desire to thrive, is connected to our consciously creating the context needed for that thriving, and that it is inextrcably tied to the well-being, the continuation, of other species and the health of our wider ecology.

Can we learn to see that we don’t exist above or beyond the ecosystem? That those turnip seeds, in their tiny purple majesty, are as essential as the bees that come to the comfrey, the deer who watch from the shaded wood, the cardinal that sings from the Guardian Oak, the groundhog who thinks I don’t see her in the tall grass at the edge of the yard, to the spider silent in the rain-silvered web at the side of the garage, are as essential to our own survival as they are to ours?

Make art about interconnections, about ecosystems

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Daily Prompt <3 Fame, and Ms. Dickinson

2 June 2016

Fame is a bee
by Emily Dickinson
Fame is a bee.
It has a song—
It has a sting—
Ah, too, it has a wing.

Make art about bees, or fame.

DSCN3292

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